Formation and stability of the self-consistent one-dimensional tail current sheet

The paper investigates the formation, the structure, and the stability of self-consistent one-dimensional current sheets in which the ions carry most of the current and momentum (the occurrence of which was suggested by observations of Mitchell et al., 1990; and Sergeev et al., 1990). Results of the analysis showed that, for the case of a cold current sheet, the characteristic thickness lamba equals to about (Bz/B0) exp 4/3 c/omega(p0), where Bz is the normal field component, B0 is the asymptotic magnitude of the reversing field, and c/omega(p0)is the collisionless ion skin depth based on lobe density. A two-dimensional self-consistent dynamical simulation model is developed, which demonstrates that these idealized current sheets are unstable to kink perturbations driven by the anisotropic pressure distribution produced by the chaotic nature of the particle orbits in a field-reversal region.