Speaker
Maria Hamrin
(Umeå University)
Description
In the vicinity of magnetic reconnection, magnetic energy is transferred
into kinetic
energy. Such a region hence corresponds to a electrical load and it
should manifest
itself as large and positive values of the power density, E.J>>0, where
E and J are
the electric field and the current density, respectively. From simple
theoretical
arguments we find that an event with E.J>~20pW/m^3 in the Earth's
magnetotail
(X<-10RE and |Y|<10R_E) is likely to be associated with reconnection.
Using Cluster
plasma sheet data from 2001--2004 we confirm that events with
E.J>~20pW/m^3 indeed
often are associated with reconnection. The power density can easily be
computed from
multi-spacecraft data, and we argue that the power density is a
powerful tool for
identifying possible reconnection events from large sets of observed
data, e.g., from
the Cluster and MMS missions.
Primary author
Maria Hamrin
(Umeå University)
