Explosive Magnetotail Activity

Modes and manifestations of the explosive activity in the Earth's magnetotail, as well as its onset mechanisms and key pre-onset conditions are reviewed. Two mechanisms for the generation of the pre-onset current sheet are discussed, namely magnetic flux addition to the tail lobes, or other high-latitude perturbations, and magnetic flux evacuation from the near-Earth tail associated with dayside reconnection. Reconnection onset may require stretching and thinning of the sheet down to electron scales. It may also start in thicker sheets in regions with a tailward gradient of the equatorial magnetic field B z ; in this case it begins as an ideal-MHD instability followed by the generation of bursty bulk flows and dipolarization fronts. Indeed, remote sensing and global MHD modeling show the formation of tail regions with increased B z , prone to magnetic reconnection, ballooning/interchange and flapping instabilities. While interchange instability may also develop in such thicker sheets, it may grow more slowly compared to tearing and cause secondary reconnection locally in the dawn-dusk direction. Post-onset transients include bursty flows and dipolarization fronts, micro-instabilities of lower-hybrid-drift and whistler waves, as well as damped global flux tube oscillations in the near-Earth region. They convert the stretched tail magnetic field energy into bulk plasma acceleration and collisionless heating, excitation of a broad spectrum of plasma waves, and collisional dissipation in the ionosphere. Collisionless heating involves ion reflection from fronts, Fermi, betatron as well as other, non-adiabatic, mechanisms. Ionospheric manifestations of some of these magnetotail phenomena are discussed. Explosive plasma phenomena observed in the laboratory, the solar corona and solar wind are also discussed.

Modeling substorm dynamics of the magnetosphere: from self-organization and self-organized criticality to nonequilibrium phase transitions

Earth's magnetosphere during substorms exhibits a number of characteristic features such as the signatures of low effective dimension, hysteresis, and power-law spectra of fluctuations on different scales. The largest substorm phenomena are in reasonable agreement with low-dimensional magnetospheric models and in particular those of inverse bifurcation. However, deviations from the low-dimensional picture are also quite considerable, making the nonequilibrium phase transition more appropriate as a dynamical analog of the substorm activity. On the other hand, the multiscale magnetospheric dynamics cannot be limited to the features of self-organized criticality (SOC), which is based on a class of mathematical analogs of sandpiles. Like real sandpiles, during substorms the magnetosphere demonstrates features, that are distinct from SOC and are closer to those of conventional phase transitions. While the multiscale substorm activity resembles second-order phase transitions, the largest substorm avalanches are shown to reveal the features of first-order nonequilibrium transitions including hysteresis phenomena and a global structure of the type of a temperature-pressure-density diagram. Moreover, this diagram allows one to find a critical exponent, that reflects the multiscale aspect of the substorm activity, different from the power-law frequency and scale spectra of autonomous systems, although quite consistent with second-order phase transitions. In contrast to SOC exponents, this exponent relates input and output parameters of the magnetosphere. Using an analogy to the dynamical Ising model in the mean-field approximation, we show the connection between the data-derived exponent of nonequilibrium transitions in the magnetosphere and the standard critical exponent beta of equilibrium second-order phase transitions.