On the relationship between kinetic and fluid formalisms for convection in the inner magnetosphere

Abstract

In the inner magnetosphere, the plasma flows are mostly slow compared to thermal or Alfvén speeds, but the convection is far away from the ideal magnetohydrodynamic regime since the gradient/curvature drifts become significant. Both kinetic (Wolf, 1983) and two-fluid (Peymirat and Fontaine, 1994; Heinemann, 1999) formalisms have been used to describe plasma dynamics, but it is not fully understood how they relate to each other. We explore the relations among kinetic, fluid, and recently developed "average" (Liu, 2006) models in an attempt to find the simplest yet realistic way to describe the convection. First, we prove analytically that the model of (Liu, 2006), when closed with the assumption of a Maxwellian distribution, is equivalent to the fluid model of (Heinemann, 1999). Second, we analyze the transport of both one-dimensional and two-dimensional Gaussian-shaped blob of hot plasma. For the kinetic case, it is known that the time evolution of such a blob is gradual spreading in time. For the fluid case, Heinemann and Wolf (200la, 2001b) showed that in a one-dimensional idealized case, the blob separates into two drifting at different speeds. We present a fully nonlinear solution of this case, confirming this behavior but demonstrating what appears to be a shocklike steepening of the faster drifting secondary blob. A new, more realistic two-dimensional example using the dipole geometry with a uniform electric field confirms the one-dimensional solutions. Implications for the numerical simulations of magnetospheric dynamics are discussed. Copyright 2008 by the American Geophysical Union.