MHD Ballooning Instability in the Plasma Sheet
Authors: C.Z. Cheng and S. Zaharia
Date of PPPL Report: October 2003
Published in: Geophysical Research Letters 31:6 (23 March 2004) L06809/1-4.
Based on the ideal-MHD model the stability of ballooning modes is investigated by employing realistic 3D magnetospheric equilibria, in particular for the substorm growth phase. Previous MHD ballooning stability calculations making use of approximations on the plasma compressibility can give rise to erroneous conclusions. Our results show that without making approximations on the plasma compressibility the MHD ballooning modes are unstable for the entire plasma sheet where beq is greater than or equal to 1, and the most unstable modes are located in the strong cross-tail current sheet region in the near-Earth plasma sheet, which maps to the initial brightening location of the breakup arc in the ionosphere. However, the MHD beq threshold is too low in comparison with observations by AMPTE/CCE at X = -(8 - 9)RE, which show that a low-frequency instability is excited only when beq increases over 50. The difficulty is mitigated by considering the kinetic effects of ion gyroradii and trapped electron dynamics, which can greatly increase the stabilizing effects of field line tension and thus enhance the beq threshold [Cheng and Lui, 1998]. The consequence is to reduce the equatorial region of the unstable ballooning modes to the strong cross-tail current sheet region where the free energy associated with the plasma pressure gradient and magnetic field curvature is maximum.