Observational Evidence of Dissipative Small Scale Processes: Geotail Spacecraft Observation and Simulation of Electrostatic Solitary Waves

In recent spacecraft observations, coherent microscale structures such as electrostatic solitary waves are observed in various regions of the magnetosphere. The Geotail spacecraft observation has shown that these solitary waves are associated with high energy non-thermal electrons flowing along the magnetic field. The solitary structures are generated as a result of a long time evolution of coherent nonlinear trapping of electrons as found in bump-on-tail, bi-stream and Buneman instabilities. It is noted that these solitary waves can be generated at distant regions far away from the spacecraft locations, because these trapped electrons, or electron holes, are drifting much faster than the local thermal plasmas. Some of the solitary waves are accompanied by perpendicular electric fields indicating that two-or three-dimensional potential structures are passing by the spacecraft. Depending on the local plasma parameters, these multi-dimensional solitary structures couple with perpendicular modes such as electrostatic whistler modes and lower-hybrid modes. In a long time evolution, these perpendicular modes are dissipated via self-organization of small solitary potentials, leading to formation of one-dimensional potential troughs as observed in the deep magnetotail. The above dissipative small-scale processes are reproduced in particle simulations, and they can be used for diagnostics of electron dynamics from spacecraft observation of multi-dimensional solitary waves in various regions of the magnetosphere. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.