The Influence of Oxygen Ions on the Formation of a Thin Current Sheet in the Magnetotail

Abstract

A thin current sheet in the Earth’s magnetotail with characteristic thickness of one to several proton gyroradii is often observed during magnetospheric disturbances named substorms, when a relatively thick current configuration in the magnetotail is narrowed to an extremely small thickness and then can spontaneously be destroyed. The current-sheet destruction is usually accompanied by such active processes as plasma acceleration and heating, as well as generation of an induced electric field and magnetohydrodynamic waves. In this paper, we developed and investigated a model of formation of a thin current sheet in which, along with protons, we have taken into account single-charged oxygen ions coming from the ionosphere into the magnetotail current sheet during magnetically active periods. The aim of this simulation is to study the peculiarities of thin current-sheet formation in two-component plasma and investigate its structure. It is shown that equilibrium configuration can have some characteristic properties. In particular, if the system consists only of protons or heavy ions, single-scale current equilibrium supported by quasi-adiabatic particles is formed. When a current sheet is formed in plasma that consists of a mixture of protons and oxygen ions in comparable concentrations, a current sheet can be formed with heavy ions as current carriers and chaotic proton trajectories that make a negative contribution to the current, due to which the current-density profile becomes bifurcated with the minimum at the center and maxima at the periphery of the sheet. The results may be useful for the interpretation of observational data in the Earth’s magnetotail.