Temporal Evolution of Flux Tube Entanglement at the Magnetopause as Observed by the MMS Satellites

Qi, Yi; Russell, C. T.; Jia, Y. D.; Hubbert, Mark

doi:10.1002/essoar.10504155.1

Cited by 2 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Later at T = 20 and 30 min, as is plotted in 3‐D in Figures 3 and 4, and observed by Qi et al. (2020), the field lines, instead of curving toward the individual flux rope axes, do curve toward the central current sheet, consistent with the picture that the two ropes are actively pulling against each other.…”

Section: Model Resultssupporting

confidence: 83%

“…In contrast, events found in MMS observations consist of compression on both sides with a current sheet in the middle. This configuration is consistent with two magnetic flux tubes merging at their interface (Øieroset et al, 2019;Qi et al, 2020).…”

supporting

confidence: 82%

“…Compared with the three stages identified by Qi et al. (2020), our T = 10 min is an early stage, between T = 20 and 30 min is the middle stage, and between T = 30 and 40 min represents the late stage evolving into disconnected tubes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 64%

“…The originally disparate flux tubes then collide and merge, producing a pair of flux tubes with axis approximately perpendicular to each other (entanglement), via a second round of magnetic reconnection (Russell & Qi, 2020). Following this hypothesis, multiple cases consistent with the early, middle, and late stages of time evolution of such FTE reconnections have been identified in the MMS data obtained between 2015 and 2018 (Qi et al., 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 76%

“…In MMS observations, an entanglement event typically lasts 10–100 s, in a 100 km/s magnetic sheath flow (Qi et al., 2020), so the average radius of one of the two compressed flux ropes is about 0.25 R E , smaller than that of a stand‐alone FTE measured and modeled in pre‐MMS era models, which may extend up to a few R E . In this study, we set the radius R 0 = 0.4 R E , which is between the recently observed ion‐scale FTE size and the size used in traditional models.…”

Section: Model Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Temporal Evolution of Flux Rope/Tube Entanglement in 3‐D Hall MHD Simulations

Jia

et al. 2021

JGR Space Physics

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Magnetic reconnection, the process in which magnetic fields of opposite polarity annihilate and reconnect converting magnetic energy into kinetic energy, has long been a classic topic of research in plasma physics. In addition to its ubiquity and explosive energy release, at the magnetopause, the change in magnetic field topology during magnetic reconnection allows particles from the solar wind and the magnetosphere to mix. Such mixing, as well as the topological change itself, is believed to be the major channel for mass and momentum exchange on a global scale. On the day side of the magnetosphere, magnetic reconnection is often associated with a commonly observed phenomenon called the flux transfer event (FTE), characterized by the magnetic field in the form of a magnetic flux rope (Russell & Elphic, 1979). Four different theories have been proposed to reconstruct/generate their global topologies, and it is not yet observationally settled which mechanism is operative. Three mechanisms are summarized by Fear et al. (2008) and Figure 1: The original connected flux rope model (Russell & Elphic, 1979); the magnetic island model, often called the multiple X-line model (Lee & Fu, 1985); and the outflow-region bubble model requiring a single x-line (Scholer, 1988; Southwood et al., 1988), which is later associated with "crater" FTEs when spacecraft encounters the separatrix of reconnection (Trenchi et al., 2019). A fourth type is the proposed magnetic reconnection induced by flow vortices, such as modeled

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Section: Model Resultssupporting

confidence: 83%

supporting

confidence: 82%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 64%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Section: Model Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Temporal Evolution of Flux Rope/Tube Entanglement in 3‐D Hall MHD Simulations

Jia

et al. 2021

JGR Space Physics

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Characterization of Magnetic Flux Contents for Flux Transfer Events and its Implications for Flux Rope Formation at the Earth's Magnetopause

Wang,

Zou,

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Flux transfer events (FTEs) are a type of magnetospheric phenomena that exhibit distinctive observational signatures from the in-situ spacecraft measurements across the Earth’s magnetopause. They are generally believed to possess a magnetic field configuration of a magnetic flux rope and formed through magnetic reconnection at the dayside magnetopause, sometimes accompanied with enhanced plasma convection in the ionosphere. We examine two FTE events under the condition of southward interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) with a dawn-dusk component at the magnetopause by applying the Grad-Shafranov (GS) reconstruction method to the in-situ measurements by the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) spacecraft to derive the magnetic flux contents associated with the FTE flux ropes. In particular, given a cylindrical magnetic flux rope configuration derived from the GS reconstruction, the magnetic flux content can be characterized by both the toroidal (axial) and poloidal fluxes. We then estimate the amount of magnetic flux (i.e., the reconnection flux) encompassed by the area “opened” in the ionosphere, based on the ground-based Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) observations. We find that for event 1, the FTE flux rope is oriented in the approximate dawn-dusk direction, and the amount of its poloidal magnetic flux agrees with the corresponding reconnection flux. For event 2, the agreement among the estimates of the magnetic fluxes is uncertain. We provide a detailed description about our interpretation for the topological features of the FTE flux ropes, based on a formation scenario of sequential magnetic field reconnection between adjacent field lines, consistent with our results.

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Temporal Evolution of Flux Tube Entanglement at the Magnetopause as Observed by the MMS Satellites

Cited by 2 publications

References 9 publications

Temporal Evolution of Flux Rope/Tube Entanglement in 3‐D Hall MHD Simulations

Temporal Evolution of Flux Rope/Tube Entanglement in 3‐D Hall MHD Simulations

Characterization of Magnetic Flux Contents for Flux Transfer Events and its Implications for Flux Rope Formation at the Earth's Magnetopause

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