Electron acceleration and thermalization at magnetotail separatrices

Abstract

In this study we use the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission to investigate the electron acceleration and thermalization occurring along the magnetic reconnection separatrices in the magnetotail. We find that initially cold electron lobe populations are accelerated towards the X line forming beams with energies up to a few keV's, corresponding to a substantial fraction of the electron thermal energy inside the exhaust. The accelerated electron populations are unstable to the formation of electrostatic waves which develop into nonlinear electrostatic solitary waves. The waves' amplitudes are large enough to interact efficiently with a large part of the electron population, including the electron beam. The wave-particle interaction gradually thermalizes the beam, transforming directed drift energy to thermal energy.

References in corpus (7)

• Electron-Scale Dynamics of the Diffusion Region during Symmetric Magnetic Reconnection in Space
• Physical Origin of the Quadrupole Out-of-Plane Magnetic Field in Hall-MHD Reconnection
• Electron Heating by Debye-Scale Turbulence in Guide-Field Reconnection
• Nonlinear Development of Streaming Instabilities In Strongly Magnetized Plasmas
• On the Role of Separatrix Instabilities in Heating the Reconnection Outflow Region
• The Physical Foundation of the Reconnection Electric Field
• Buneman instability in a magnetized current-carrying plasma with velocity shear

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Magnetic Reconnection within the Boundary Layer of a Magnetic Cloud in the Solar Wind
• Higher-order nonequilibrium term: Effective power density quantifying evolution towards or away from local thermodynamic equilibrium
• The dynamics of electron holes in current sheets