EGU22-7069
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-7069
EGU General Assembly 2022
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Interplay between magnetic reconnection and flapping instabilities in the magnetotail: global hybrid-Vlasov simulation of the Earth’s magnetosphere

Giulia Cozzani1, Urs Ganse1, Yann Pfau-Kempf1, Markku Alho1, Jonas Suni1, Maxime Grandin1, Lucile Turc1, Ivan Zaitsev1, Maarja Bussov1, Maxime Dubart1, Harriet George1, Konstantinos Horaites1, Talgat Manglayev1, Konstantinos Papadakis1, Vertti Tarvus1, Honyang Zhou1, and Minna Palmroth1,2
Giulia Cozzani et al.
  • 1Department of Physics, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
  • 2Finnish Meteorological Institute, Space and Earth Observation Center, Helsinki, Finland

Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental process in plasma and a major cause of energy conversion and transport by means of magnetic field topology reconfiguration. It takes place in thin plasma sheets, where energy is often explosively converted from the magnetic field to plasma heating and particle energization. Magnetic reconnection in Earth’s magnetotail is thought to play a crucial role in geomagnetic storms and substorms, one of the most explosive phenomena in the context of Earth’s magnetosphere. Several other current sheet-related processes, such as the ballooning instability, tearing instability, and a variety of flapping instabilities, can occur in the magnetotail, and the interplay between magnetic reconnection and these current sheet instabilities is largely unexplored. In this study, we investigate the interplay between magnetic reconnection and other instabilities taking place in the magnetotail current sheet, using a hybrid-Vlasov simulation that provides a three-dimensional description of the global coupled solar wind-magnetosphere system down to the ion-kinetic scale. In particular, we identify and characterize the flapping instability that develops in the magnetotail midnight sector and we discuss its dynamics in relation to magnetotail magnetic reconnection.

How to cite: Cozzani, G., Ganse, U., Pfau-Kempf, Y., Alho, M., Suni, J., Grandin, M., Turc, L., Zaitsev, I., Bussov, M., Dubart, M., George, H., Horaites, K., Manglayev, T., Papadakis, K., Tarvus, V., Zhou, H., and Palmroth, M.: Interplay between magnetic reconnection and flapping instabilities in the magnetotail: global hybrid-Vlasov simulation of the Earth’s magnetosphere, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-7069, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-7069, 2022.

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