Collisionless conductivity and stochastic heating of the plasma sheet in the geomagnetic tail

Abstract

The chaotic single particle orbits in the geomagnetic tail are used to calculate the collisionless conductivity. It is shown that the stochasticity from inhomogeneous magnetic fields leads to a power law decay of the single particle correlation function similar to an elastic collisional process. The height‐integrated dissipative part of the collisionless conductivity governs the irreversible stochastic heating of the plasma sheet. Both exponentially growing reconnection type magnetic perturbations and a sinusoidal pulse with a half period up to 1 hour in duration are used to analyze the plasma sheet heating.