Speaker
Ms
Elin Eriksson
(Swedish Institute of Space Physics)
Description
Regions with vanishing magnetic field, also referred to as magnetic nulls, are of
high interest in plasma physics. Near magnetic nulls particles become
unmagnetized and can by interacting with electric fields be accelerated up to high
energies. Magnetic nulls have been observed and studied before using Cluster data
with different methods. Magnetic nulls found by Cluster have been obtained with
spacecraft separation comparable to ion scales and particle instrumentation is not
sufficient to resolve in detail physical processes of particle acceleration and heatings
around the null. Now we use the MMS (Magnetospheric Multiscale) data to study
these processes in detail. The MMS separation is well below the ion scale for the
studied events and data from the particle instruments have sufficient resolution
during burst mode to resolve what is happening.
We study nulls in detail during phase 1a of the MMS mission. Burst data during this
phase are mainly from the magnetopause, but some intervals cover the
magnetosheath, bowshock, and solar wind. In this study presented here we focus
on magnetic nulls associated with strong currents near the Bow shock. Magnetic
nulls can potentially be associated with the electron diffusion region (EDR) of
magnetic reconnection, where we expect particle acceleration to occur. A
preliminary study has already identified several nulls of high interest in the burst
data. We present some results from the preliminary study in the bow shock region
from Nov 4, 2015.
Primary author
Ms
Elin Eriksson
(Swedish Institute of Space Physics)
Co-authors
Andris Vaivads
(Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Uppsala, Sweden)
Barbara Giles
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)
Christopher Russell
(UCLA, USA)
Craig Pollock
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)
Daniel Graham
(Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Uppsala, Sweden)
Ivy Bo Peng
(KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden)
James Burch
(Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, USA)
Mats André
(Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Uppsala, Sweden)
Per-Arne Lindqvist
(KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden)
Robert Ergun
(LASP, University of Colorado, USA)
Roy Torbert
(University of New Hampshire, USA)
Stefano Markidis
(KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden)
Werner Magnes
(Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria)
Yuri Khotyaintsev
(Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Uppsala, Sweden)
