Turbulent mass transfer caused by vortex induced reconnection in collisionless magnetospheric plasmas

T. K. M. Nakamura (), H. Hasegawa, W. Daughton, S. Eriksson, W. Y. Li and R. Nakamura
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T. K. M. Nakamura: Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences
H. Hasegawa: Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
W. Daughton: Los Alamos National Laboratory
S. Eriksson: University of Colorado Boulder
W. Y. Li: Swedish Institute of Space Physics
R. Nakamura: Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences

Nature Communications, 2017, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Magnetic reconnection is believed to be the main driver to transport solar wind into the Earth’s magnetosphere when the magnetopause features a large magnetic shear. However, even when the magnetic shear is too small for spontaneous reconnection, the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability driven by a super-Alfvénic velocity shear is expected to facilitate the transport. Although previous kinetic simulations have demonstrated that the non-linear vortex flows from the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability gives rise to vortex-induced reconnection and resulting plasma transport, the system sizes of these simulations were too small to allow the reconnection to evolve much beyond the electron scale as recently observed by the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) spacecraft. Here, based on a large-scale kinetic simulation and its comparison with MMS observations, we show for the first time that ion-scale jets from vortex-induced reconnection rapidly decay through self-generated turbulence, leading to a mass transfer rate nearly one order higher than previous expectations for the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability.

Date: 2017
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-01579-0

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