EGU23-7317, updated on 08 Jan 2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-7317
EGU General Assembly 2023
© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Two classes of magnetotail Dipolarization Fronts observed by MagnetosphericMultiscale Mission: A statistical overview

Soboh Alqeeq1, olivier Le Contel1, patrick Canu1, Alessandro Retinò1, Thomas Chust1, Laurent Mirioni1, Alexandre Chuvatin1, Rumi Nakamura2, Narges Ahmadi3, Frederick Wilder4, Daniel Gershman5, Yuri Khotyaintsev6, Per Arne Lindqvist7, Robert Ergun3, James Burch8, Roy Torbert9, Stephen Fuselier8, Christopher Russell10, Hanying Wei10, Robert Strangeway10, and the MMS team*
Soboh Alqeeq et al.
  • 1CNRS, Laboratoire de Physique des Plasmas UMR7648, Palaiseau, France (soboh.al-qeeq@lpp.polytechnique.fr)
  • 2Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria
  • 3Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics, Colorado, USA
  • 4Department of Physics, University of Texas, Arlington, TX, USA
  • 5NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
  • 6Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Uppsala, Sweden
  • 7Space and Plasma Group, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
  • 8Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas, USA
  • 9Space Science Center and Department of Physics, University of New Hampshire, Durham, USA
  • 10Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
  • *A full list of authors appears at the end of the abstract

We carried out a statistical study of 132 Dipolarization Fronts (DFs) events detected by the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission (MMS) during the full 2017 Earth’s magnetotail season. We found that two DF classes can be distinguished: class I (74.4%) corresponds to the standard DF properties and energy dissipation whereas a new class II (25.6%), which includes the six DF discussed in S. Alqeeq et al. 2022, corresponds to a bump of the magnetic field associated with a minimum of the ion and electron pressures and a reversal of the energy conversion process. For both classes we found that ions are mostly decoupled from the magnetic field by the Hall fields. The electron pressure gradient term is also contributing to the ion decoupling and likely responsible for an electron decoupling at DF. Both DF classes show that the energy conversion process in the spacecraft frame is driven by the diamagnetic current dominated by the ion pressure gradient. In the fluid frame, it is driven by the electron pressure gradient. In addition, we have shown that the energy conversion processes are not homogeneous at the electron scale mostly due to the variations of the electric fields for both DF classes.

MMS team:

K. R. Bromund (5), D. Fischer (2) , B. L. Giles (5), Y. Saito (11)

How to cite: Alqeeq, S., Le Contel, O., Canu, P., Retinò, A., Chust, T., Mirioni, L., Chuvatin, A., Nakamura, R., Ahmadi, N., Wilder, F., Gershman, D., Khotyaintsev, Y., Lindqvist, P. A., Ergun, R., Burch, J., Torbert, R., Fuselier, S., Russell, C., Wei, H., and Strangeway, R. and the MMS team: Two classes of magnetotail Dipolarization Fronts observed by MagnetosphericMultiscale Mission: A statistical overview, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 23–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-7317, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-7317, 2023.