Localized Oscillatory Dissipation in Magnetopause Reconnection

Abstract

Data from the NASA Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission are used to investigate asymmetric magnetic reconnection at the dayside boundary between the Earth's magnetosphere and the solar wind (the magnetopause). High-resolution measurements of plasmas, electric and magnetic fields, and waves are used to identify highly localized (~15 electron Debye lengths) standing wave structures with large electric-field amplitudes (up to 100 mV/m). These wave structures are associated with spatially oscillatory dissipation, which appears as alternatingly positive and negative values of J dot E (dissipation). For small guide magnetic fields the wave structures occur in the electron stagnation region at the magnetosphere edge of the EDR. For larger guide fields the structures also occur near the reconnection x-line. This difference is explained in terms of channels for the out-of-plane current (agyrotropic electrons at the stagnation point and guide-field-aligned electrons at the x-line).

References in corpus (4)

• Two-scale structure of the electron dissipation region during collisionless magnetic reconnection
• New Measure of the Dissipation Region in Collisionless Magnetic Reconnection
• Kinetic signatures of the region surrounding the X-line in asymmetric (magnetopause) reconnection
• The effect of a guide field on local energy conversion during asymmetric magnetic reconnection: MMS observations

Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Assessing the time dependence of reconnection with Poynting's theorem: MMS observations
• The Reversibility Of Magnetic Reconnection
• Electron crescent distributions as a manifestation of diamagnetic drift in an electron scale current sheet