Diffusion at the magnetopause

Conference · Sat Dec 31 04:00:00 EST 1994

OSTI ID:63052

Winske, D; Thomas, V A ^[1]

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1. Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States). Applied Theoretical Physics Division

A major unresolved problem of magnetospheric physics is how energy and momentum in the solar wind enter the Earth`s magnetosphere through the magnetopause. For many years it has been recognized that this transfer occurs through one of three mechanisms: magnetic reconnection, viscous effects due to the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, or diffusion through wave-particle interactions. While observations clearly indicate the dominance of reconnection at the subsolar magnetopause when the solar wind`s magnetic field opposes the Earth`s magnetic field, the situation is much less clear for northward IMF when all three processes may contribute significantly. Efforts to demonstrate ``anomalous`` diffusion for magneto-pause conditions through full particle simulations have had mixed success: significant wave-particle effects due to instabilities in the lower hybrid frequency range do occur, but appear to be highly localized; the calculations can not be run long enough to see long range effects. In this paper the authors discuss results of particle-ion, fluid-electron simulations of 2-D magnetopause dynamics for northward IMF, in which the magnetopause structure is generated dynamically through the interaction of two streaming plasmas (solar wind and magnetosphere).

• OSTI ID: 63052
• Report Number(s): CONF-940604--; ISBN 0-7803-2006-9
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

66 PHYSICS
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
DYNAMICS
EARTH MAGNETOSPHERE
ENERGY TRANSFER
INTERACTIONS
INTERPLANETARY MAGNETIC FIELDS
ION DRIFT
MAGNETOPAUSE
MOMENTUM TRANSFER
MORPHOLOGY
SOLAR WIND