Simultaneous Multispacecraft Probing of Electron Phase Space Holes

Abstract

We present a series of electron holes observed simultaneously on four Magnetospheric Multiscale spacecraft in the plasma sheet boundary layer. The multispacecraft probing shows that the electron holes propagated quasi-parallel to the local magnetic field with velocities of a few thousand kilometers per second with parallel spatial scales of a few kilometers (a few Debye lengths). The simultaneous multispacecraft probing allows analyzing the 3-D configuration of the electron holes. We estimate the electric field gradients and charge densities associated with the electrons holes. The electric fields are fit to simple 3-D electron hole models to estimate their perpendicular scales and demonstrate that the electron holes were generally not axially symmetric with respect to the local magnetic field. We emphasize that most of the electron holes had a complicated structure not reproduced by the simple models widely used in single-spacecraft studies.