Abstract
AbstractWe calculate the aspect ratio of the electron diffusion region (EDR) during symmetric magnetic reconnection using magnetic field gradients measured by the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Mission. The technique introduced in this paper is validated using a particle‐in‐cell simulation and used to calculate the EDR aspect ratios for three MMS‐observed magnetotail EDRs which are compared with the EDR aspect ratio predicted by scaling dependencies on asymptotic upstream electron β. We then use the aspect ratio to calculate the normalized reconnection rate and show that it is within uncertainty of the normalized reconnection rate found by previous studies for three MMS‐observed EDRs. Because the magnetic field gradients are velocity‐frame independent and typically very well measured by MMS, the technique can be used to obtain the normalized reconnection rate with higher fidelity than established methods.
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