scholarly journals The effect of electron thermal conduction on plasma pressure gradient during reconnection of magnetic field lines

1987 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.K. Chu
Geosciences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 314
Author(s):  
Skralan Hosteaux ◽  
Emmanuel Chané ◽  
Stefaan Poedts

Magnetised coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are quite substantially deformed during their journey form the Sun to the Earth. Moreover, the interaction of their internal magnetic field with the magnetic field of the ambient solar wind can cause deflection and erosion of their mass and magnetic flux. We here analyse axisymmetric (2.5D) MHD simulations of normal and inverse CME, i.e., with the opposite or same polarity as the background solar wind, and attempt to quantify the erosion and the different forces that operate on the CMEs during their evolution. By analysing the forces, it was found that an increase of the background wind density results in a stronger plasma pressure gradient in the sheath that decelerates the magnetic cloud more. This in turn leads to an increase of the magnetic pressure gradient between the centre of the magnetic cloud and the separatrix, causing a further deceleration. Regardless of polarity, the current sheet that forms in our model between the rear of the CME and the closed field lines of the helmet streamer, results in magnetic field lines being stripped from the magnetic cloud. It is also found that slow normal CMEs experience the same amount of erosion, regardless of the background wind density. Moreover, as the initial velocity increases, so does the influence of the wind density on the erosion. We found that increasing the CME speed leads to a higher overall erosion due to stronger magnetic reconnection. For inverse CMEs, field lines are not stripped away but added to the magnetic cloud, leading to about twice as much magnetic flux at 1 AU than normal CMEs with the same initial flux.


2021 ◽  
Vol 502 (1) ◽  
pp. 1263-1278
Author(s):  
Richard Kooij ◽  
Asger Grønnow ◽  
Filippo Fraternali

ABSTRACT The large temperature difference between cold gas clouds around galaxies and the hot haloes that they are moving through suggests that thermal conduction could play an important role in the circumgalactic medium. However, thermal conduction in the presence of a magnetic field is highly anisotropic, being strongly suppressed in the direction perpendicular to the magnetic field lines. This is commonly modelled by using a simple prescription that assumes that thermal conduction is isotropic at a certain efficiency f < 1, but its precise value is largely unconstrained. We investigate the efficiency of thermal conduction by comparing the evolution of 3D hydrodynamical (HD) simulations of cold clouds moving through a hot medium, using artificially suppressed isotropic thermal conduction (with f), against 3D magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) simulations with (true) anisotropic thermal conduction. Our main diagnostic is the time evolution of the amount of cold gas in conditions representative of the lower (close to the disc) circumgalactic medium of a Milky-Way-like galaxy. We find that in almost every HD and MHD run, the amount of cold gas increases with time, indicating that hot gas condensation is an important phenomenon that can contribute to gas accretion on to galaxies. For the most realistic orientations of the magnetic field with respect to the cloud motion we find that f is in the range 0.03–0.15. Thermal conduction is thus always highly suppressed, but its effect on the cloud evolution is generally not negligible.


2004 ◽  
Vol 11 (5/6) ◽  
pp. 579-587 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. M. Zelenyi ◽  
H. V. Malova ◽  
V. Yu. Popov ◽  
D. Delcourt ◽  
A. S. Sharma

Abstract. Thin current sheets represent important and puzzling sites of magnetic energy storage and subsequent fast release. Such structures are observed in planetary magnetospheres, solar atmosphere and are expected to be widespread in nature. The thin current sheet structure resembles a collapsing MHD solution with a plane singularity. Being potential sites of effective energy accumulation, these structures have received a good deal of attention during the last decade, especially after the launch of the multiprobe CLUSTER mission which is capable of resolving their 3D features. Many theoretical models of thin current sheet dynamics, including the well-known current sheet bifurcation, have been developed recently. A self-consistent 1D analytical model of thin current sheets in which the tension of the magnetic field lines is balanced by the ion inertia rather than by the plasma pressure gradients was developed earlier. The influence of the anisotropic electron population and of the corresponding electrostatic field that acts to restore quasi-neutrality of the plasma is taken into account. It is assumed that the electron motion is fluid-like in the direction perpendicular to the magnetic field and fast enough to support quasi-equilibrium Boltzmann distribution along the field lines. Electrostatic effects lead to an interesting feature of the current density profile inside the current sheet, i.e. a narrow sharp peak of electron current in the very center of the sheet due to fast curvature drift of the particles in this region. The corresponding magnetic field profile becomes much steeper near the neutral plane although the total cross-tail current is in all cases dominated by the ion contribution. The dependence of electrostatic effects on the ion to electron temperature ratio, the curvature of the magnetic field lines, and the average electron magnetic moment is also analyzed. The implications of these effects on the fine structure of thin current sheets and their potential impact on substorm dynamics are presented.


2015 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Catto ◽  
Sergei I. Krasheninnikov

A rotating and magnetized three-dimensional axisymmetric equilibrium for hot plasma confined by a gravitational field is found. The plasma density and current can exhibit strong equatorial plane localization, resulting in disk equilibria with open magnetic field lines. The associated equatorial plane pinching results in magnetic field flaring, implying a strong gravitational squeezing of the plasma carrying ambient magnetic field lines toward the gravitational source. At high plasma pressure, the magnetic field becomes strongly radial outside the disk. The model predicts the rotation frequency bound, the condition for a plasma disk, and the requirement for strong magnetic field flaring.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatphicha Promfu ◽  
Suwicha Wannawichian ◽  
Jonathan Nichols ◽  
John Clarke

<p>In this work, the locations of observed Ganymede’s magnetic footprint were compared with the locations predicted by the magnetic field model under different plasma conditions. The shifts of Ganymede's magnetic footprint locations from average footpath given by Grodent et al. (2008) were analyzed. The average path is created from about 1000 images taken by instruments onboarded Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The position shifts indicate the variation of magnetic field line mapping from Ganymede to Jupiter’s ionosphere. The two sets of data from HST were analyzed to obtain the locations of Ganymede’s magnetic footprint in 2007 and 2016. For both sets of data, at longitude ranging approximately from 170° to 180°, we found that the locations were significantly shifted in poleward direction between 0.5° to 2° from the average footpath. Different from data in May 2007, the Ganymede’s magnetic footprint locations in May 2016 at longitude about 160° could possibly locate in equatorward direction. At orbital distance of Ganymede about 15 R<sub>J</sub>, in Jupiter’s middle magnetosphere, there is strong influence of plasma, whose major source is Io’s volcanic eruptions. Thus, the variations of plasma resulting in the stretching of magnetic field lines affect the magnetic field mapping from Ganymede to ionosphere. Furthermore, based on the magnetodisc model, the hot plasma pressure anisotropy strongly influences the stretching of the field lines and the mapped locations of Ganymede’s footprint in ionosphere to be shifted in either poleward or equatorward directions. In this study, we detected both poleward and equatorward shifts in different observations, whose connection with the plasma environment in the middle magnetosphere awaits for further study.</p>


2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. E. Garcia ◽  
E. Leer ◽  
H. L. Pécseli ◽  
J. K. Trulsen

Abstract. Analytical models are presented for currents along vertical magnetic field lines due to slow bulk electron motion in plasmas subject to a gravitational force. It is demonstrated that a general feature of this problem is a singularity in the plasma pressure force that develops at some finite altitude when a plasma that is initially in static equilibrium is set into slow motion. Classical fluid models thus do not allow general steady-state solutions for field-aligned currents. General solutions have to be non-stationary, varying on time scales of many periods of a plasma equivalent to the Brunt–Väisälä frequency. Except for very special choices of parameters, a steady-state solution exists only in an average sense. The conditions at large altitudes turn out to be extremely sensitive to even small changes in parameters at low altitudes. Low frequency fluctuations detected at large altitudes in the polar regions need not be caused by local low frequency instabilities, but merely reflect small fluctuations in conditions at low altitudes.


2004 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 251-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Zaharia ◽  
C. Z. Cheng ◽  
K. Maezawa

Abstract. The knowledge of plasma pressure is essential for many physics applications in the magnetosphere, such as computing magnetospheric currents and deriving mag-netosphere-ionosphere coupling. A thorough knowledge of the 3-D pressure distribution has, however, eluded the community, as most in situ pressure observations are either in the ionosphere or the equatorial region of the magnetosphere. With the assumption of pressure isotropy there have been attempts to obtain the pressure at different locations,by either (a) mapping observed data (e.g. in the ionosphere) along the field lines of an empirical magnetospheric field model, or (b) computing a pressure profile in the equatorial plane (in 2-D) or along the Sun-Earth axis (in 1-D) that is in force balance with the magnetic stresses of an empirical model. However, the pressure distributions obtained through these methods are not in force balance with the empirical magnetic field at all locations. In order to find a global 3-D plasma pressure distribution in force balance with the magnetospheric magnetic field, we have developed the MAG-3-D code that solves the 3-D force balance equation computationally. Our calculation is performed in a flux coordinate system in which the magnetic field is expressed in terms of Euler potentials as . The pressure distribution, , is prescribed in the equatorial plane and is based on satellite measurements. In addition, computational boundary conditions for ψ surfaces are imposed using empirical field models. Our results provide 3-D distributions of magnetic field, plasma pressure, as well as parallel and transverse currents for both quiet-time and disturbed magnetospheric conditions. Key words. Magnetospheric physics (magnetospheric configuration and dynamics; magnetotail; plasma sheet)


2011 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 323-326
Author(s):  
C. M. WANG

AbstractOne of the main limitations of energy gain in laser wakefield accelerators is the electron dephasing, In order to resolve the dephasing problem, a tapered plasma channel is proposed and tested numerically. The tapered density is created by means of a laser heating, combining an axially increased external magnetic field. The locally strong magnetic field prevents the thermal energy transport crossing the field lines, and leads to a pressure buildup. The pressure gradient expels the plasma radially and tapers the density axially. A tapered plasma with a density contrast of 2.2 within a 6-cm channel is established. Propagating in the tapered plasma channel, the energy of an accelerated electron is expected to be enhanced greatly.


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