Tail reconnection in the global magnetospheric context

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Volume Title
A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
Date
2017-11-28
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Language
en
Pages
6
1269-1274
Series
Annales Geophysicae, Volume 35, issue 6
Abstract
The key dynamics of the magnetotail have been researched for decades and have been associated with either three-dimensional (3-D) plasma instabilities and/or magnetic reconnection. We apply a global hybrid-Vlasov code, Vlasiator, to simulate reconnection self-consistently in the ion kinetic scales in the noon-midnight meridional plane, including both dayside and nightside reconnection regions within the same simulation box. Our simulation represents a numerical experiment, which turns off the 3-D instabilities but models ion-scale reconnection physically accurately in 2-D. We demonstrate that many known tail dynamics are present in the simulation without a full description of 3-D instabilities or without the detailed description of the electrons. While multiple reconnection sites can coexist in the plasma sheet, one reconnection point can start a global reconfiguration process, in which magnetic field lines become detached and a plasmoid is released. As the simulation run features temporally steady solar windinput, this global reconfiguration is not associated with sudden changes in the solar wind. Further, we show that lobe density variations originating from dayside reconnection may play an important role in stabilising tail reconnection.
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Palmroth , M , Hoilijoki , S , Juusola , L , Pulkkinen , T I , Hietala , H , Pfau-Kempf , Y , Ganse , U , Von Alfthan , S , Vainio , R & Hesse , M 2017 , ' Tail reconnection in the global magnetospheric context : Vlasiator first results ' , Annales Geophysicae , vol. 35 , no. 6 , pp. 1269-1274 . https://doi.org/10.5194/angeo-35-1269-2017