Role of Kinetic Alfvén Wave in Energy Transportation in Magnetopause

English Abstract:

The transportation of energy is the vital subject in space physics. Magnetohydrodynamic waves are known to play very important role in plasma transportation. In the present work, we have studied the localization of kinetic Alfvén wave (KAW), which is three dimensionally propagating. These localized structures might be a possible candidate for transported energy at small scales in dissipation range of turbulent spectra. For this scenario, governing dynamical equation of KAW has been derived taking ponderomotive nonlinearity into account. Furthermore, these equations are solved numerically using pseudo spectral method in magnetopause regime to analyse the localized structures of KAW and corresponding turbulent spectrum. Spectrum shows steeper scaling followed by inertial range and this steepening is due to the transportation of energy from large to small scale, which eventually contributes to heating of plasma. The present mechanism may be useful for explaining the plasma heating and particle acceleration in magnetopause.The present study is correlated with the observations made by Chaston et al. [2008] using THEMIS data.

Reference

Chaston, C., et al. (2008), Turbulent heating and cross-field transport near the magnetopause from THEMIS, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L17S08,doi:10.1029/2008GL033601.