Interpretation of high‐speed flows in the plasma sheet

Pursuing an idea suggested by Pontius and Wolf (1990), we propose that the “bursty bulk flows” observed by Baumjohann et al. (1990) and Angelopoulos et al. (1992) are “bubbles” in the Earth's plasma sheet. Specifically, they are flux tubes that have lower values of pV 5/3 than their neighbors, where p is the thermal pressure of the particles and V is the volume of a tube containing one unit of magnetic flux. Whether they are created by reconnection or some other mechanism, the bubbles are propelled earthward by a magnetic buoyancy force, which is related to the interchange instability. Most of the major observed characteristics of the bursty bulk flows can be interpreted naturally in terms of the bubble picture. We propose a new “stratified fluid” picture of the plasma sheet, based on the idea that bubbles constitute the crucial transport mechanism. Results from simple mathematical models of plasma sheet transport support the idea that bubbles can resolve the pressure balance inconsistency, particularly in cases where plasma sheet ions are lost by gradient/curvature drift out the sides of the tail or bubbles are generated by reconnection in the middle plasma sheet.