Abstract
AbstractWithin the inner magnetosphere, the occurrence of plasma waves and/or magnetic field structures plays an important role in the dynamics of the particle populations, accelerating some particles to higher energies while scattering others. The 2013 Cluster Inner Magnetosphere Campaign was designed to investigate this process based on observations made at small separation scales. In addition, it provides an ideal opportunity for the study of small‐scale structures. This paper presents observations of previously unreported small‐scale magnetic field structures and investigates their characteristics and spatial properties. These structures, seen in the STAFF‐SC data set, are characterized by a rotation in the field direction and are observed to have spatial sizes of a few tens of kilometers, with a central core region around 10 km and are probably filamentary current structures. Using a variance analysis, it was determined that the maximum variance direction was close to being perpendicular to the external magnetic field. Based on the size of the central core region the current density is of the order of 10–40 . While they may affect the profile of these structures, data calibration effects were ruled out as their origin.
Highlights
Within the terrestrial inner magnetosphere, plasma wave modes play a key role in the redistribution of energy between the various particle populations present, through processes such as acceleration or scattering
During the period July-October 2013, Cluster instigated a special Inner Magnetosphere Campaign (IMC) whose primary objectives were to investigate the relationship between plasma wave modes and changes in the particle distributions
We have presented observations of four magnetic field structures as seen by the STAFF search coil magnetometer on the satellites Cluster 3 and Cluster 4 in the inner magnetosphere
Summary
Within the terrestrial inner magnetosphere, plasma wave modes play a key role in the redistribution of energy between the various particle populations present, through processes such as acceleration or scattering. During the period July-October 2013, Cluster instigated a special Inner Magnetosphere Campaign (IMC) whose primary objectives were to investigate the relationship between plasma wave modes and changes in the particle distributions. These data enabled the investigation of the origin (Balikhin et al, 2015), dispersion relation (Walker et al, 2015), propagation (Shklyar & Balikhin, 2017), and structure (Aryan et al, 2019) of magnetosonic waves. The small-scale separations (a few tens of kilometers) achieved enable the examination of the spatiotemporal properties of any small-scale structures observed During this campaign, it was noted that some of the observational periods exhibited small-scale nonlinear magnetic field measurements from the Cluster STAFF-SC search coil magnetometer that, to our knowledge, have not been reported previously.
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