Exploring the Kinetic Scale Mechanism of the Dayside Magnetopause Current System

• Other Authors: Beedle, Jason (Author), The Catholic University of America (Degree granting institution), Uritsky, Vadim (Thesis advisor), Gershman, Daniel (Committee member), Robinson, Robert (Committee member), Poh, Gang (Committee member), Shuster, Jason (Committee member)
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: unknown
• Published: The Catholic University of America 2024
• Subjects: Chapman-Ferraro Current; Magnetic Reconnection; Magnetopause; Magnetosphere; Space Physics; Space Weather; Northern lights
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1961/cuislandora:316483; https://cuislandora.wrlc.org/islandora/object/cuislandora%3A316483

Originating from the Sun’s atmosphere, the solar wind fills interplanetary space with a dynamic expanse of plasma and magnetic field lines. As the solar wind moves through the solar system it can encounter obstacles such as the Earth’s magnetosphere and its intrinsic magnetic field. Separating the solar wind’s plasma from the magnetosphere is a boundary layer called the magnetopause. Across this boundary layer, pressure gradients generate a current sheet named the Chapman-Ferraro (CF) current. Magnetic reconnection can then occur in the current sheet when opposing magnetic field lines in the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field are driven together by plasma flows, break, and then reform, changing the local magnetic topology and releasing previously stored magnetic energy into the surrounding plasma. This process occurs in what are known as diffusion regions. Specifically, there are two such diffusion regions in the standard reconnection process: an ion diffusion region (IDR) and an electron diffusion region (EDR). The process of magnetic reconnection leads to the magnetopause acting as the entry “gate” of the solar wind’s energy into the Earth’s magnetosphere, providing both the opportunity to view the Northern Lights and potentially harming our increasingly critical orbital infrastructure. Through this process, the magnetopause and its current sheet become essential pieces of the near-Earth space weather system, making its generation, structure, and the impact of magnetic reconnection important areas of research. In this dissertation, I will discuss how my coauthors and I utilize data from NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Mission to study how the magnetopause current sheet is formed, how the diffusion regions’ current system differs from the background magnetopause, and theorize how the magnetopause current sheet itself interacts with the diffusion regions through the following published studies and current research:In Beedle et al. (2022b), I statistically analyzed the diamagnetic current density during ...