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Intermittency at Earth’s bow shock: Measures of turbulence in quasi-parallel and quasi-perpendicular shocks
  • James Plank,
  • Imogen Gingell
James Plank
University of Southampton

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Imogen Gingell
Imperial College London
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Abstract

Recent simulations and observations have revealed reconnecting current sheets in the turbulent transition region of Earth’s bow shock. However, the link between reconnection in the shock and turbulent reconnection in the magnetosheath is unknown. We have therefore used observations from Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) over four separate bow shock crossings of varying θ_Bn to characterise turbulence in the shock transition region and how it evolves towards the magnetosheath. We fit power laws to the magnetic spectrum over many short intervals, allowing us to observe the spectrum evolving. We find that we can separate the behaviour of the power-law index in the shock transition region from that of the upstream and downstream plasma when θ_Bn is in the quasi-perpendicular range (45º