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Four-Spacecraft Magnetic Curvature Analysis on Kelvin-Helmholtz Waves in MHD Simulations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2018

R. Kieokaew
Affiliation:
CGAFD, Mathematics, CEMPS, University of Exeter, Exeter, the United Kingdom
C. Foullon
Affiliation:
CGAFD, Mathematics, CEMPS, University of Exeter, Exeter, the United Kingdom
B. Lavraud
Affiliation:
Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie, Université de Toulouse, Toulous, France
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Abstract

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Four-spacecraft missions are probing the Earth’s magnetospheric environment with high potential for revealing spatial and temporal scales of a variety of in-situ phenomena. Magnetic curvature is intrinsic to curved magnetic fields where the magnetic energy is stored in the form of magnetic tension. In-situ magnetic curvature has been resolved by the four-spacecraft technique called “magnetic curvature analysis” (MCA). We test the MCA on 2.5D MHD simulations of curved magnetic structures induced by Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) waves, with increasing (regular) tetrahedron sizes of virtual spacecraft. We have found variations of the curvature vectors both in radii and orientations depending on the sizes of the tetrahedron. This is helpful to better understand the MCA measures when the technique is applied to in-situ data without knowing the scale sizes of plasma structures under consideration. This study lends support for cross-scale observations to better understand the nature of curvature and its role in plasma phenomena.

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2018 

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