Abstract
The turbulent solar wind magnetic field shows structures that are characterized by sudden, strong changes in the field magnitude and/or direction. Such structures can be intermittent if their increments found from time series spacecraft measurements deviate from a Gaussian distribution. Current sheets are a possible source of such intermittency in plasma turbulence. We try three different techniques to find such events from the magnetometer data of the Magnetosphere Multiscale Mission (MMS) – time derivative of the magnetic field, partial variance increment (PVI), and a modified Tsurutani-Smith (TS) method. We find a non-Gaussian distribution of magnetic field time derivatives after noise reduction. These intermittent events are identified with varying levels of noise reduction to obtain an optimum value of filtering frequency. These events are found to match with those obtained by setting a suitable threshold value for the PVI, which operates at larger time increments. The TS method which operates at even larger time increments also identifies some of these events. Identification of the same events in different MMS spacecraft confirms the presence of physical phenomena causing this intermittency. The magnetic field rotation angle across these events is also significantly larger than the average rotation angle for such intervals. Measurement of their duration indicates that these structures are of the order or even smaller than ion kinetic scales. Further high resolution observations and numerical simulations are required to probe their real spatial-temporal scales.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the seed grant of Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad. SS was supported by Science & Engineering Research Board (SERB) grant SRG/2021/001439. KM would like to thank Tulasi Parashar for useful discussions.
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S.S. did a large fraction of the data analysis, wrote the programs for the spline and PVI methods, prepared figures 2-8, and helped in writing the manuscript. P.D. did the TS method analysis, made figures 1 and 9 and helped in writing the manuscript. K.M. conceptualized the study, wrote the main manuscript text, and helped in analysis and interpretation of results. All authors reviewed the manuscript.
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Satyasmita, S., Das, P. & Makwana, K.D. Identifying kinetic scale magnetic discontinuity structures in turbulent solar wind. Astrophys Space Sci 369, 7 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10509-024-04266-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10509-024-04266-x