Electron diffusion region embedded in a dipolarization front – an MMS/Cluster conjunction event
- 1Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 8042 Graz, Austria
- 2Institute of Physics, University of Graz, 8010 Graz, Austria
- 3Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, Houston TX, USA
- 4Department of Physics and Astronomy, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH, USA
- *A full list of authors appears at the end of the abstract
Magnetic reconnection, a key energy conversion process in the Earth’s magnetosphere, has extensively been studied during the last few decades. Multi-point missions such as Cluster or Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) showed that magnetic reconnection takes place not only at large-scale stable magnetopause or magnetotail current sheets but also in transient localized current sheets.
Here, we revisit the Dipolarization Front (DF) event, observed by the MMS spacecraft on September 08, 2018/14:51:30 UT in the Earth’s magnetotail. Previous studies reported that this DF shows a strong non-ExB type electron flow and a crescent-shaped distribution function, suggesting that this DF hosts an electron diffusion region (Marshall et al. JGR, 2020).
To further characterize this special event, we (1) use conjunction observations of the MMS and Cluster spacecraft to investigate the event in the context of large scales and (2) apply the polynomial magnetic field reconstruction technique by Denton et al. (JGR, 2020) to characterize the embedded electron current sheet including its velocity and the X-line exhaust opening angle.
MMS: James L. Burch, Barbara L. Giles, Roy B. Torbert, Olivier Le Contel, et al., Cluster: Philippe Escoubet, Iannis S. Dandouras, Chris Carr, Andrew N. Fazakerley, et al.
How to cite: Hosner, M., Nakamura, R., Schmid, D., Nakamura, T., Panov, E. V., Volwerk, M., Vörös, Z., Roberts, O. W., Blasl, K. A., Settino, A., Korovinskiy, D., Marshall, A. T., and Denton, R. E. and the MMS and Cluster Team: Electron diffusion region embedded in a dipolarization front – an MMS/Cluster conjunction event, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 23–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-7930, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-7930, 2023.
