Understanding Turbulence in the Plasma Sheet and Its Role in Transport

Abstract:

In this study the nature and implications of turbulence in the plasma sheet is explored with emphasis on large scale and meso-scale processes. The relationship between turbulence and reconnection, and its contribution to magnetospheric transport and dynamics will be evaluated. Observational studies to date have shown that the magnetotail rarely exhibits simple steady convection; instead, flows in the magnetotail have a high level of fluctuations. Flows driven on the scale of the entire system are well described by MHD and break up into structures that cascade to smaller scales. MHD simulation studies have shown the presence of realistic fluctuation spectra both in case studies where direct comparisons to observations have been made and in idealized test cases which have been compared to the statistical studies of observed events. The simulations do a good job of representing the effects of dissipation and yield dissipative scale lengths that are comparable to those inferred from observations. At intermediate, meso-scales, which receive energy from both large and small scales, turbulent processes are important in the plasma sheet, in particular around dipolarization fronts. We will explore the interaction between large-scale and smaller-scale fluctuations and their contributions to the magnetotail current sheet structure. We will use a global MHD simulation and a two dimensional version of the iPIC3Dimplicit particle in cell simulation separately to examine how turbulence is related to global and local processes involved in the current sheet.