References

ANGEO

Annales Geophysicae

ANGEO

1432-0576

Copernicus GmbH

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/angeo-26-955-2008

Transient and localized processes in the magnetotail: a review

Sharma

A. S.

¹ Nakamura

² Runov

² ¹² Grigorenko

E. E.

³ Hasegawa

⁴ Hoshino

⁵ Louarn

⁶ Owen

C. J.

⁷ Petrukovich

³ Sauvaud

J.-A.

⁶ Semenov

V. S.

⁸ Sergeev

V. A.

⁸ Slavin

J. A.

⁹ Sonnerup

B. U. Ö.

¹⁰ Zelenyi

L. M.

³ Fruit

⁶ Haaland

¹¹ Malova

³ Snekvik

¹¹

Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, USA

Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria

Space Research Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Kanagawa, Japan

University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

CESR/CNRS, Toulouse, France

Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College, London, UK

Institute of Physics, St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia

Laboratory for Extraterrestrial Physics, NASA GSFC, Greenbelt, USA

Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, Hanover, USA

University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

currently at: Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA

13 05 2008

26 4 955 1006

This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Many phenomena in the Earth's magnetotail have characteristic temporal scales of several minutes and spatial scales of a few Earth radii (RE). Examples of such transient and localized mesoscale phenomena are bursty bulk flows, beamlets, energy dispersed ion beams, flux ropes, traveling compression regions, night-side flux transfer events, and rapid flappings of the current sheet. Although most of these observations are linked to specific interpretations or theoretical models they are inter-related and can be the different aspects of a physical process or origin. Recognizing the inter-connected nature of the different transient and localized phenomena in the magnetotail, this paper reviews their observations by highlighting their important characteristics, with emphasis on the new results from Cluster multipoint observations. The multi-point Cluster measurements have provided, for the first time, the ability to distinguish between temporal and spatial variations, and to resolve spatial structures. Some examples of the new results are: flux ropes with widths of 0.3 RE, transient field aligned currents associated with bursty bulk flows and connected to the Hall current at the magnetic reconnection, flappings of the magnetotail current sheet with time scales of 100 s–10 min and thickness of few thousand km, and particle energization including velocity and time dispersed ion structures with the latter having durations of 1–3 min. The current theories of these transient and localized processes are based largely on magnetic reconnection, although the important role of the interchange and other plasma modes are now well recognized. On the kinetic scale, the energization of particles takes place near the magnetic X-point by non-adiabatic processes and wave-particle interactions. The theory, modeling and simulations of the plasma and field signatures are reviewed and the links among the different observational concepts and the theoretical frameworks are discussed. The mesoscale processes in the magnetotail and the strong coupling among them are crucial in developing a comprehensive understanding of the multiscale phenomena of the magnetosphere.

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