Initial MMS observations of flux ropes embedded in dipolarization events
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Gang Kai Poh1, James A Slavin1, Guan Le2, Robert J Strangeway3, C. T. Russell3, Brian J Anderson4, David Fischer5, Ferdinand Plaschke6, Hannes Karl Leinweber7, Kenneth R Bromund8, Larry Kepko9, Mark Chutter10, Olivier Le Contel11, Roy B Torbert12, Rumi Nakamura13, Werner Magnes5 and Wolfgang Baumjohann14, (1)University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI, United States, (2)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (3)Univ California, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (4)Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States, (5)Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria, (6)IWF ÖAW, Graz, Austria, (7)Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (8)NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (9)NASA GSFC, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (10)University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, United States, (11)Laboratoire de Physique des Plasmas, Paris, France, (12)Univ New Hampshire, Durham, NH, United States, (13)Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria, (14)Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria
Abstract:
Magnetic reconnection is the most important energy conversion process in the Earth’s magnetotail. Flux ropes (FRs) are helical magnetic structures created by multiple X-line reconnection in the tail current sheet with a guide field in the y-direction. Their formation is thought to be an integral part of the process that may have important consequences for the onset and subsequent rate of reconnection. In the near-tail flux ropes are known to be carried Earthward and tailward by fast reconnection-driven flows in approximately equal numbers. The Earthward flows, i.e. bursty bulk flows (BBFs), generate dipolarization fronts (DFs) as they interact with the closed magnetic flux in their path. Both phenomenon, DFs and the FRs that follow them, have been extensively studied using measurements taken by the Geotail, Cluster and THEMIS missions. However, the interaction of the FRs with the surrounding BBF and dipolarized magnetic flux tubes has received very little attention due to the lack of high-time resolution multi-point measurements. We present and analyze the initial MMS magnetic field measurements of Earthward moving flux ropes embedded in dipolarization events collected in the near-tail during the commissioning phase.
