Two types of flow reversal events observed in magnetotail

Abstract:

Geotail survey in magnetotail provides us with about 200 rapid flow reversal events where tailward flow (< -500 km/s) turns to earthward flow (> +300 km/s) within 10 minutes. We selected 46 definite flow reversal events from them in order to study the physics of X-lines, removing events where stationary plasma and/or tail lobe components are observed at the timing of flow reversals.

We found that flow reversal events can be classified into two types according to electron heating/acceleration and low frequency wave activity. About 2/3 of the flow reversal events look “active.” In these events, strong electron heating/acceleration and existence of ion-electron decoupling region are commonly observed. The intense wave active in the lower-hybrid frequency range is also observed even in high β region around the neutral sheet. These features are consistent with the collisionless reconnection model demonstrated by recent full kinetic numerical simulations. In contrast, other 1/3 of flow reversal events do not present any of them. No visible ion-electron decoupling is found in these "non-active" flow reversal events. This new finding indicates that the strong wave activity in the electric field would be related to the ion-electron decoupling process and that wave activity is a possible indicator for liveliness of reconnection (= evidence of fast electron flow).

The fact that the non-active flow reversals tend to be distributed at the outer fringes of the active flow reversal regions implies that they are related to the three-dimensional structure of magnetic reconnection. In this presentation, we will discuss physical meaning of the difference between active and non-active flow reversal events. It is hard to discuss further collectively the nature of the non-active flow reversals only with single spacecraft measurements. This would be a good topic to be explored using multi-spacecraft data.