Electron Crescent Distributions as a Manifestation of Diamagnetic Drift in an Electron-Scale Current Sheet: Magnetospheric Multiscale Observations Using New 7.5 ms Fast Plasma Investigation Moments.

We report Magnetospheric Multiscale observations of electron pressure gradient electric fields near a magnetic reconnection diffusion region using a new technique for extracting 7.5 ms electron moments from the Fast Plasma Investigation. We find that the deviation of the perpendicular electron bulk velocity from × drift in the interval where the out-of-plane current density is increasing can be explained by the diamagnetic drift.

Reconnection-Driven Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence in a Simulated Coronal-Hole Jet.

Extreme-ultraviolet and X-ray jets occur frequently in magnetically open coronal holes on the Sun, especially at high solar latitudes. Some of these jets are observed by white-light coronagraphs as they propagate through the outer corona toward the inner heliosphere, and it has been proposed that they give rise to microstreams and torsional Alfvén waves detected in the solar wind. To predict and understand the signatures of coronal-hole jets, we have performed a detailed statistical analysis of such a jet simulated with an adaptively refined magnetohydrodynamics model.

Criticality and turbulence in a resistive magnetohydrodynamic current sheet.

Scaling properties of a two-dimensional (2d) plasma physical current-sheet simulation model involving a full set of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations with current-dependent resistivity are investigated. The current sheet supports a spatial magnetic field reversal that is forced through loading of magnetic flux containing plasma at boundaries of the simulation domain. A balance is reached between loading and annihilation of the magnetic flux through reconnection at the current sheet; the transport of magnetic flux from boundaries to current sheet is realized in the form of spatiotemporal avalanches exhibiting power-law statistics of lifetimes and sizes.

Structures in magnetohydrodynamic turbulence: detection and scaling.

We present a systematic analysis of statistical properties of turbulent current and vorticity structures at a given time using cluster analysis. The data stem from numerical simulations of decaying three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic turbulence in the absence of an imposed uniform magnetic field; the magnetic Prandtl number is taken equal to unity, and we use a periodic box with grids of up to 1536³ points and with Taylor Reynolds numbers up to 1100. The initial conditions are either an X -point configuration embedded in three dimensions, the so-called Orszag-Tang vortex, or an Arn'old-Beltrami-Childress configuration with a fully helical velocity and magnetic field.

Coexistence of self-organized criticality and intermittent turbulence in the solar corona.

An extended data set of extreme ultraviolet images of the solar corona provided by the SOHO spacecraft is analyzed using statistical methods common to studies of self-organized criticality (SOC) and intermittent turbulence (IT). The data exhibit simultaneous hallmarks of both regimes: namely, power-law avalanche statistics as well as multiscaling of structure functions for spatial activity. This implies that both SOC and IT may be manifestations of a single complex dynamical process entangling avalanches of magnetic energy dissipation with turbulent particle flows.