Universal scaling of thin current sheets in space plasma
- 1Moscow State University, Scobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics, Moscow, Russian Federation (hmalova@yandex.ru)
- 2Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation
- 3Department of Space Physics, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Moscow, Russia
- 4National Research University “Higher School of Economics”, Moscow, Russian Federation
- 5Physical Faculty of Moscow State University, Moscow, Russian Federation
- 6Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Gӧttingen, Germany
Thin current sheets (TCSs) with thicknesses about ion Larmor radii can play the key role in space; particularly they can store and then explosively release the accumulated free energy. The dynamics of ions moving along quasi-adiabatic trajectories in TCSs is different from one of magnetized electrons following guiding center drift orbits. Due to this property TCSs can be described in a frame of a hybrid approach. The thickness of the super-thin embedded electron sheet remains uncertain because of the scale-free character of magnetized electron motion. We propose a new analytical approach to describe the multilayer TCS and provide the universal expression describing the embedded electron sheet as a function of the cross-sheet transversal coordinate z characterizing TCS. We demonstrated that the unique property of the electron sheet is the nonlinear character of magnetic field profile: B(z) ~ z 1/3 which conforms excellently with MAVEN observations in the Martian magnetotail.
This work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (grant # 20-42-04418).
How to cite: Malova, H., Zelenyi, L., Grigorenko, E., Popov, V., and Dubinin, E.: Universal scaling of thin current sheets in space plasma, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-3521, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-3521, 2021.
