Citation:
Jing Huang, Meng Zhou, HuiMin Li, XiaoHua Deng, Jiang Liu, ShiYong Huang,
2019: Small-scale dipolarization fronts in the Earth′s magnetotail, Earth and Planetary Physics, 3, 358-364.
doi: 10.26464/epp2019036
2019, 3(4): 358-364. doi: 10.26464/epp2019036
Small-scale dipolarization fronts in the Earth′s magnetotail
| 1. | Institute of Space Science and Technology, Nanchang University, Nanchang 330031, China |
| 2. | School of Physics and Optoelectronic Engineering, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China |
| 3. | Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences and Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA |
| 4. | School of Electronic and Information, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China |
Previous studies suggest that dipolarization fronts (DFs) are 1 to 3RE (RE is the earth radius) wide in the dawn-dusk direction. Recent kinetic simulations have found that DFs may break up into small-scale structures after they are produced by reconnection. Motivated by this simulation, we revisited the scale size of DFs in the dawn-dusk direction by using Cluster observations during the years when the inter-distance among Cluster spacecraft was between 1000 and 2000 km. We selected the DFs that were detected by more than one spacecraft and estimated the radii of these DFs by a simple geometrical analysis, which is based on comparison of DF normals observed by different spacecraft. We found a few DFs that were only a few ion inertial lengths in the dawn-dusk direction. These results point out the importance of multi-scale coupling during the evolution of DFs.
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