This paper studies the effective polytropic index in the central plasma sheet （CPS） by using the method of Kartalev et al. （2006）, which adopts the denoising technique of Haar wavelet to identify the homogeneous MHD Bernoulli integral （MBI） and has been frequently used to study the polytropic relation in the solar wind. We chose the quiet CPS crossing by Cluster C1 during the interval 08：51：00-09：19：00 UT on 03 August 2001. In the central plasma sheet, thermal pressure energy per unit mass is the most important part in MBI, and kinetic energy of fluid motion and electromagnetic energy per unit mass are less important. In the MBI, there are many peaks, which correspond to isothermal or near isothermal processes. The interval lengths of homogenous MBI regions are generally less than 1 min. The polytropic indexes are calculated by linearly fitting the data of lnp and Inn within a 16 s window, which is shifted forward by 8 s step length. Those polytropic indexes with IRI ≥0.8 （R is the correlation coefficient between lnp and inn） and p-value≤0.1 in the homogeneous regions are almost all in the range of [0, 1]. The mean and median effective polytropic indexes with high R and low p-value in homogeneous regions are 0.34 and 0.32 respectively, which are much different from the polytropic index obtained by traditional method （αtrad=-0.15）. This result indicates that the CPS is not uniform even during quiet time and the blanket applications of polytropic law to plasma sheet may return misleading value of polytropic index. The polytropic indexes in homogeneous regions with a high correlation coefficient basically have good regression significance and are thus credible. These results are very important to understand the energy transport in magnetotail in the MHD frame.
In an attempt to study the flow bursts in the Earth＇s plasma sheet we select an event that took place on August 7, 2004 in the expansion phase of a substorm, using data from the geomagnetic index, solar wind data, plasma and magnetic field observa- tions from C1 Cluster satellite （the Cluster mission has 4 satellites） and from Double Star TC-1 satellite. In MHD approach, TC-1 firstly observed the tailward flow, then the earthward, and finally the flow altemated in two directions. C1 firstly ob- served the earthward plasma flow, and then the tailward plasma flow. Before flow bursts are observed by TC-1 and C1, there are disturbances in local entropy with their tailward local entropy larger than those of the earthward. The kinetic features of the plasma flow observed by C1 are similar to those in MHD. However, kinetic characteristics of the plasma flow observed by TC-1 are far more than the description in MHD. The inadequacy mainly exists in two cases： （i） the firstly enhanced tailward flows given in MHD are found without significant increase of the energetic tailward flux; （ii） the almost stagnant flow in MHD is composed of the enhanced energetic ion flux in both earthward and tailward directions. The earthward flow burst observed by TC-1 might be multiple overshoots and rebounds. The earthward flow burst observed by C1 might be simply rebounded in the near-Earth. The pulsation observed by C1 is earlier than that observed by TC-1 with the former intensity less than that of the latter. After the energetic ion flux in the tailward direction is significantly enhanced, the power spectrum intensity of the ULF wave commences to increase obviously, which may suggest that the stream instability is closely correlated with ULF pulsations.
MA YuDuanCAO JinBinFU HuiShanREME H.DANDOURAS I.YANG JunYingWANG ZhiQiangTAO DanYANG Jian
In August 2001,Cluster satellites observed that the mid-tail current sheet(CS) moved southward continuously for almost seven hours.Meanwhile,Cluster crossed back and forth the CS repeatedly.This means that the large-scale southward movement of the CS was accompanied by a small-scale CS flapping during this period.Using the minimum-variation-analysis(MVA) method and the multi-spacecraft data,we calculated the normal vector,current density and the magnetic curvature of the CS,the results showed that the CS alternated between flattened CS and tilted CS for several times.Strong dawn-dusk oscillations were found for the tilted CS,which caused the repeated crossings of the center of CS by the satellites.This feature is obviously different from the previous observations of the vertical flapping of the CS induced by the kink instability.Two types of flapping were observed:One of them is accompanied with bursty bulk flows(BBFs) and the other is not.This suggests that in this event there was no direct relationship between the CS flapping and BBFs.
The nonadiabatic acceleration of plasma sheet ions is important to the understanding of substorm energetic injections and the formation of ring current. Previous studies show that nonadiabatic acceleration of protons by magnetic field dipolarization is hard to occur at X>–10 RE because the time-scale of dipolarization(several minutes) is much larger than the gyroperiod of protons there(several seconds). In this paper, we present a case of nonadiabatic acceleration of plasma sheet ions observed by Cluster on October 30, 2006 at(XGSM, YGSM)=(-7.7, 4.7) RE. The nonadiabatic acceleration of ions is caused not by previously reported magnetospheric dipolarization but by the ultra low frequency(ULF) waves during magnetospheric dipolarization. The nonadiabatic acceleration of ions generates a new energy flux structure of ions, which is characterized by the usual energy flux increase of ions(28–80 ke V) and a concurrent energy flux decrease of ions in a lower energy range(10 e V–20 ke V). These new observations constitute a complete physical picture: The lower energy ions absorb the wave energy, and thus get accelerated to higher energy. We use a nonadiabatic model to interpret the ion energy flux variations. Both analytic and simulation results are in good agreement with the observations. This indicates that the nonadiabatic acceleration associated with ULF waves superposed on dipolarized magnetic field is an effective mechanism for ion energization in the near-Earth plasma sheet. The presented energy flux structures can be used as a proxy to identify the similar dynamic process.
WANG Zhi QiangCAO Jin BinRME HenriDANDOURAS IannisMA Yu Duan
This paper, using the dataset of BBFs （bursty bulk flows） observed by two Cluster satellites C1 and C4, studies the difference between onset times of BBFs observed by C1 and C4. It is found that the onset time differences of most of BBFs observed by Cl and C4 are smaller than 60 s. The average onset time difference of BBFs of CI and C4 is 68.5 s. The probabilities of onset time difference of BBFs of C1 and C4 larger than 30, 60, 90 and 120 s are respectively 55%, 35%, 27% and 23%. The largest onset time difference of BBFs of C1 and C4 decreases with the increase of earthward component of maximum velocities of BBFs. The onset time difference of BBFs of C1 and C4 results from the velocity inhomogeneity inside the flow channel of BBF, which may be produced in propagation path and/or in source region of BBFs. Such a wide range of onset time difference of BBFs suggests that the velocity inhomogeneity inside the flow channel of BBF is various. These results are very important to the current study of substorm research based on THEMIS data because they indicate that it is impossible to determine the onset time of BBF with a single satellite.
The rapid change in the Earth’s magnetosphere caused by solar wind disturbances has been an important part of the solar wind-magnetosphere interaction.However most of the previous studies focused on the perturbation of the Earth’s magnetic field caused by solar wind dynamic pressure changes.In this paper,we studied the response of geosynchronous magnetic field and the magnetic field to the rapid southward turning of interplanetary magnetic field during the interval 1350 1420 UT on 7May 2007.During this event,BZ component of the interplanetary magnetic field decreased from 15 nT to 10 nT within 3 min(1403 1406 UT).The geosynchronous magnetic field measured by three geosynchronous satellites(GOES 10 12)first increased and then decreased.The variations of magnetic field strength in the morning sector(9 10 LT)were much larger than those in the dawn sector(5 LT).Meanwhile,the H components of geomagnetic field on the ground have similar response features but exhibit latitude and LT dependent variations.Compared with H components,the D components do not have regular variations.Although the solar wind dynamical pressure encounters small variations,the magnetic field both in space and on the ground does not display similar variations.Therefore,the increase of geomagnetic field in the dawn sector is caused by the southward turning of IMF(interplanetary magnetic field)BZ.These results will help to better understand the coupling process of geomagnetic filed and interplanetary magnetic field.
On the basis of the plasma, electric and magnetic fields jointly observed by Cluster and the Double Star TC-I spacecraft in the Earth＇s magnetotail, we have investigated the earthward flow bursts by introducing the momentum equation in the X-direction in the ideal conditions of magneto hydrodynamics （MHD）. One earthward flow burst with a peak in excess of 500 km/s was selected, when the four spacecraft of Cluster were located around -16 RE and TC-1 was located around -10 RE in the X-direction. The inter-spacecraft distances in Y and Z directions were smaller than the statistical spatial scales of the bursty bulk flows. When the Y components of E and -VxB were compared, there was no clear breakdown of the frozen-in condition during the earthward flow burst. With the measured plasma and magnetic parameters from two spacecraft at different positions in the magnetotail, the X component of the pressure gradient was calculated. Magnetic tension was calculated using the mag- netic field measured at four points, which could be compared with the assumed constant in the past research with single satel- lite. When the pressure gradient and the magnetic tension were put into the MHD momentum equation, some samples of the earthward flow bursts were accelerated and some were decelerated. The braking process of the earthward flow burst was more complicated than what the past results had shown. The accelerated samples accounted for about one third of the whole earth- ward flow bursts and discontinuously located among the decelerated elements. The original single earthward flow burst event might be split into several short flow bursts when it was moving to the Earth. Our results may partly illustrate that the duration of fast flows during three phases of substorm becomes short near the Earth. The results are consistent with the past results that fast flows intrude to places earthward the typical braking region.
MA YuDuanCAO JinBinREME HenryDANDOURAS IannisDUNLOP MalcolmLUCEK Elisabeth
