Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Small-scale dipolarization fronts in the Earth′s magnetotail

2019; Wiley; Volume: 3; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.26464/epp2019036

2096-3955

Jing Huang, Meng Zhou, Huimin Li, Xiaohua Deng, Jiang Liu, S. Y. Huang,

Solar and Space Plasma Dynamics

Previous studies suggest that dipolarization fronts (DFs) are 1 to 3 R E ( R E is the earth radius) wide in the dawn-dusk direction. Recent kinetic simulations have found that DFs may break up into small-scale structures after they are produced by reconnection. Motivated by this simulation, we revisited the scale size of DFs in the dawn-dusk direction by using Cluster observations during the years when the inter-distance among Cluster spacecraft was between 1000 and 2000 km. We selected the DFs that were detected by more than one spacecraft and estimated the radii of these DFs by a simple geometrical analysis, which is based on comparison of DF normals observed by different spacecraft. We found a few DFs that were only a few ion inertial lengths in the dawn-dusk direction. These results point out the importance of multi-scale coupling during the evolution of DFs.