Isothermal magnetosheath electrons due to nonlocal electron cross talk

Abstract

Heating of the various plasma species at the Earth's collisionless bow shock is not fully understood. Although the total amount of heating is constrained by the one‐fluid Rankine‐Hugoniot relations in terms of local plasma conditions, the partition of energy between, e.g., electrons and ions, is influenced by particle kinetics which are not considered in the Rankine‐Hugoniot approach. Additionally, in this paper we demonstrate the impact of nonlocal effects. Here we model the effects of shock‐heated electrons which traverse the magnetosheath to arrive at another point on the bow shock surface. We construct the distribution of electrons immediately downstream of each point on the bow shock from two populations: local solar wind electrons entering the magnetosheath for the first time and previously shocked electrons which have traversed the magnetosheath. We determine the self‐consistent cross‐shock potential at each point such that the resulting electron distribution gives a downstream plasma which is neutral and has zero parallel current. This leads to very little variation in the downstream electron temperature everywhere around the curved bow shock, in spite of large differences in the total (Rankine‐Hugoniot) downstream temperature. Consequently, the partition of heating between electrons and ions at the shock, i.e., the equation of state, contains nonlocal contributions. We show that heating properties at the point where the shock is exactly perpendicular controls electron heating throughout the rest of the shock surface.