Electrostatic Solitary Waves in the Central Plasma Sheet of the Earth’s Magnetotail

Abstract

Using magnetospheric multiscale (MMS) mission observations in the Earth’s magnetotail, it has been shown that numerous secondary sources of electron acceleration are formed in a hot collisionless plasma, which is turbulized by a bursty bulk flow propagating from the primary reconnection region. Such sources may be regions of secondary microreconnections occurring at electron kinetic scales. The observed electrostatic solitons, which serve as markers of “secondary magnetic separatrices,” along which electron beams accelerated to superthermal energies propagate, similar to solitons near primary reconnection separatrices have been studied in this work.