HR: 08:15h
AN: SM51D-02    [Abstracts]
TI: The Preferential Occurrence of Electrostatic Structures in Collisionless Reconnection
AU: * Ma, Z W
AF: Institute of Plasma Physics, CAS, Hefei Anhui, 230031 China
AU: * Ma, Z W
AF: University of Iowa, Room 203 Van Allen Hall Jefferson at Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA 52240 United States
AU: Huang, J
AF: Institute of Plasma Physics, CAS, Hefei Anhui, 230031 China
AU: Scudder, J D
EM: jack-scudder@uiowa.edu
AF: University of Iowa, Room 203 Van Allen Hall Jefferson at Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA 52240 United States
AU: Mozer, F S
AF: University of California, Berkeley, Space Sciences Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94729 United States
AB: Recently, very strong electrostatic structures with Debye scale at the dayside magnetopause have been frequently observed by the Polar satellite. These structures were commonly found on the magnetospheric side of the Earth's magnetopause. In our early full particle simulation starting from a symmetric initial conditions, we demonstrated that these strong electrostatic layers with Debye scale are associated with the magnetic reconnection and assist the formation of Petschek-type slow shock just inside of the reconnection separatrices. In this presentation, we carry out a full particle simulation with an asymmetric initial condition. The results indicate that the electrostatic layer is found only in the low density side or the magnetospheric side, which is consistent with the observations. Comparing different initial conditions, we try to identify the key parameters that control the occurrence of the Debye length scaled electrostatic layer.
DE: 7815 Electrostatic structures
DE: 7835 Magnetic reconnection
DE: 2712 Electric fields (2411)
DE: 2724 Magnetopause, cusp, and boundary layers
SC: SPA-Magnetospheric Physics [SM]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting