Study of flux transfer events observed at the Earth's magnetopause by THEMIS satellites

• Autor(a) principal: Marcos Vinicius Dias Silveira
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações do INPE
• Texto Completo: http://urlib.net/sid.inpe.br/mtc-m21b/2015/02.09.23.47

AB8TRACT: Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental plasma process defined as topological restructuring of magnetic fields due to changes in the connectivity of magnetic field lines. Although other phenomena, e.g., particle acceleration and heating, can happen concurrently associated with reconnection, it is the most important process because it allows the fast magnetic energy release in large scales. Flux transfer events (FTEs) are considered as a result of transient magnetic reconnection and are often observed in the vicinity of the Earth${'}$s magnetopause. Thus, the study on magnetic reconnection is one of the important issues for the solar wind-magnetospheric cou-pling processo The space physics community has been interested in FTEs since their discovery. Recently, computational simulations, and multi-point observations have provided advances to FTE generation and structure formation studies. In this work data collected by the THEMIS mission was used to investigate flux transfer events under multi-points observations, which allows to investigate the structure itself, how it influences external plasma dynamics and analyze their dynamics under magnetic reconnection location. Although the techniques presented here had been employed in previous studies, we believe that the analysis of equatorial FTEs using multipoint observations and of its subsequent motion have a big importance to better understand magnetic reconnection at the Earth${'}$s magnetopause. It was created a list of flux transfer events observed by THEMIS probes at the dayside of the magnetopause and characterized these events according to the solar wind parameters and magnetic reconnection locations. Also are presented case studies of FTEs observed at multi-point observations including representative signatures observed in dataset in this thesis.