Planar magnetic structures (PMSs), characterized by interplanetary magnetic field vectors remaining parallel to a specific plane, are commonly observed in the solar wind, especially in the sheath region of interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs). In this study, PMS events in the 2 hr regions downstream of ICME-driven shocks were investigated to reveal the relationship between PMS formation and shock environment using data collected by the Parker Solar Probe, Solar Orbiter, and Venus Express spacecraft in the inner heliosphere. PMS events are identified in the majority (around 93%) of the postshock 2 hr regions, with transit times ranging from 10 to 120 minutes, which demonstrates their common occurrence associated with ICME-driven shocks. About 33% of the detected PMS events cover the whole 2 hr intervals, called full PMS events. Most of the full PMS events are observed in the downstream region of quasi-perpendicular shocks. In addition, statistical results show that full PMS events occurring in the downstream region of quasi-perpendicular shocks are generally associated with higher magnetic compression ratios, which implies that full PMS events are more likely to be formed in the downstream region of strong quasi-perpendicular shocks.
Solar wind dynamic pressure pulses (DPPs) are small-scale plasma structures with abrupt and large-amplitude plasma dynamic pressure changes on timescales of seconds to several minutes. Overwhelming majority of DPP events (around 79.13%) reside in large-scale solar wind transients, i.e., coronal mass ejections, stream interaction regions, and complex ejecta. In this study, the intermittency, which is a typical feature of solar wind turbulence, is determined and compared during the time intervals in the undisturbed solar wind and in large-scale solar wind transients with clustered DPP events, respectively, as well as in the undisturbed solar wind without DPPs. The probability distribution functions (PDFs) of the fluctuations of proton density increments normalized to the standard deviation at different time lags in the three types of distinct regions are calculated. The PDFs in the undisturbed solar wind without DPPs are near-Gaussian distributions. However, the PDFs in the solar wind with clustered DPPs are obviously non-Gaussian distributions, and the intermittency is much stronger in the large-scale solar wind transients than that in the undisturbed solar wind. The major components of the DPPs are tangential discontinuities (TDs) and rotational discontinuities (RDs), which are suggested to be formed by compressive magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence. There are far more TD-type DPPs than RD-type DPPs both in the undisturbed solar wind and large-scale solar wind transients. The results imply that the formation of solar wind DPPs could be associated with solar wind turbulence, and much stronger intermittency may be responsible for the high occurrence rate of DPPs in the large-scale solar wind transients.
or the plasma depletion flux bubble mechanism related to interchange instabilities (Chen & Wolf, 1993).The flow channel of BBFs has a width of 1.5-2 R E in the north-south direction and 2-3 R E in the dawn-dusk direction (Nakamura et al., 2004). Their average durations are ∼10 min based on single satellite observations (Angelopoulos et al., 1996), and are ∼18.4 min based on multisatellite observations (Cao et al., 2006). Although BBFs have a limited scale and a short duration, they play a significant role in the magnetospheric activities (
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