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Sitnov et al. 2003
Sitnov, M.I., Guzdar, P.N. and Swisdak, M. (2003). A model of the bifurcated current sheet. Geophysical Research Letters 30: doi: 10.1029/2003GL017218. issn: 0094-8276.

Recent Geotail and Cluster observations revealed that thin current sheets in the near-Earth tail may have a bifurcated structure. In some cases the electrons are found to dominate the current. We present a generalization of the Harris current sheet equilibrium, which reproduces these features. The model ion distribution contains an additional element, viz. the quasi-adiabatic invariant of the ion motion across the sheet, and assumes ion temperature anisotropy outside the sheet. Bifurcated current sheets appear in the case of small ion anisotropy with Ti > Ti (pancake distributions). In the opposite case (cigar distributions) the model describes a single-peaked ion-dominated current sheet embedded in a thicker Harris sheet, which is more relevant to the outflow region of the collisionless reconnection pattern in the deHoffman-Teller frame.

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Abstract

Keywords
Magnetospheric Physics, Magnetotail, Space Plasma Physics, Kinetic and MHD theory, Space Plasma Physics, Magnetic reconnection
Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
http://www.agu.org/journals/gl/
Publisher
American Geophysical Union
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