Sub-Alfvenic/Super-Sonic Impulsive Structures in the Magnetosphere. First Results from Hybrid Fluid-Kinetic Modeling and Comparison with MMS Observations

The magnetosphere of the Earth presents a large scale plasma physics laboratory in which the complex interacting plasma phenomena are involved: global convecting plasma dynamics, wave--particle interactions in the bow shock and transmitted shock waves/impulses and magnetic field reconnection in the plasma current sheets. The NASA magnetospheric multiscale mission (MMS) provides unique observations of the thin structures and wave--particles interactions at the shock-like impulses while the spacecrafts were located at the dawn terminator (the time is 2016-03-07 20:00:00 UTC). It was assumed that these impulses may be created by the interaction between the background flow and plasma clouds. It was also assumed that those clouds were produced by either flux-transfer events or by coalescence/reconnection processes at the magnetopause current layer or by the mirror instabilities inside the low latitude boundary layer. 3-D hybrid kinetic code with separate description of the background and cloud ions was used fo...