Ion temperature anisotropy across a magnetotail reconnection jet.

ABSTRACT: A significant fraction of the energy released by magnetotail reconnection appears to go into ion heating, but this heating is generally anisotropic. We examine ARTEMIS dual-spacecraft observations of a long-duration magnetotail exhaust generated by antiparallel reconnection in conjunction with particle-in-cell simulations, showing spatial variations in the anisotropy across the outflow far (>100d_i ) downstream of the X line. A consistent pattern is found in both the spacecraft data and the simulations: While the total temperature across the exhaust is rather constant, near the boundaries T_i,|| dominates. The plasma is well above the firehose threshold within patchy spatial regions at |B_X |∈[0.1,0.5]B₀

SUBMITTER: Hietala H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4950132 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature