Abstract
Boundaries between space plasmas occur in numerous contexts and scales, from astrophysical jets to planetary magnetospheres. Mass and momentum transport across boundaries poses a fundamental problem in magnetospheric physics. Kelvin–Helmholtz instability (KHI) is a promising mechanism to facilitate transport. Although previous studies have suggested KHI occurrence in various space plasmas, theory predicts that compressibility prevents KHI excitation at boundaries with large density gradients because of previously considered boundary structures where density varies with velocity. Based on the observations of a large density gradient boundary by MAVEN at Mars, where we can observe an extreme case, in this study, we show that it is the entropy, instead of the previously considered density, that varies with the velocity in the real velocity-sheared boundary. The entropy-based boundary structure places the velocity shear in a lower-density region than the traditional density-based structure and weakens the compressibility effect. This new boundary structure thus enables KHI excitation even at large density gradient boundaries, such as at the ionopause of unmagnetized planets and the plasmapause of magnetized planets. The result suggests the ubiquitous occurrence of KHI in the plasma universe and emphasizes its important role in planetary cold plasma escape from unmagnetized planets.
1 Introduction
Momentum and mass transport mechanisms at a velocity-sheared boundary in the space plasma are important processes that affect the supply of magnetospheric plasma at various planets. In various space plasmas, collisions are often negligible (), and thus, momentum and mass transport primarily occurs through couplings between constituent charged particles and the electric/magnetic fields (). When two different plasma regimes come into contact, instabilities facilitate mass and momentum transport across the ambient magnetic field. Such boundaries occur in numerous contexts and scales from astrophysical plasmas such as at neutron star mergers (), star-forming molecular clouds (), nova explosions (), and solar corona (), in addition to various planetary magnetospheres (; ; ). The Kelvin–Helmholtz instability (KHI) () is considered a promising candidate to facilitate momentum and mass transfers across boundaries.
One of the important parameters for assessment of the occurrence of KHI is compressibility. The stability analysis of compressional plasma predicts that KHI excitation is suppressed when the density ratio across the boundary () becomes larger, due to the stabilizing effects of the compressibility with a high Mach number (, where represents the magnetosonic Mach number) (). An experimental study indicates a reduction in the growth rate of KHI and supports the theoretical prediction (). In theoretical considerations, both the velocity shear and density gradient are often expressed with the hyperbolic tangent (; ; ). This traditional density-based model of the velocity-sheared boundary has a high region in the middle of the boundary, and the KHI suppression by compressibility can become significant in large density gradient cases.
In Earth, which has a strong intrinsic magnetic field, KHI has been identified by in situ satellite observations at the boundary between the shocked solar wind and terrestrial magnetosphere (), where the density gradient is usually small (with the density ratio between the two sides of the boundary being ) and compressibility is not very important. The in-plane magnetic field (magnetic field parallel to velocity) also stabilizes KHI in the low regime, and the magnetic field geometry effects are pronounced enough to excite KHI in the Earth’s magnetosphere (). Thus, the KHI excitation at the magnetopause depends on the dipole tilt angle and interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) (). KHI can also be unstable in the inner magnetosphere, associated with localized flow channels ().
In the case of unmagnetized planets such as Mars and Venus, that do not have a global intrinsic magnetic field, the velocity-sheared boundary appears between the shocked solar wind and the ionized upper atmosphere (ionosphere), i.e., around the ionopause. The magnetic field geometry effects are also important at Venus and Mars, and KHI is mainly excited in the perpendicular plane to the IMF (). Due to the large density in the ionosphere, the compressibility effects are expected to be important and can suppress the occurrence of KHI. Despite this expectation from theory, KHI vortex-like signatures (boundary waves) have been observed on Mars (; ; ) and Venus (), where is larger than in the terrestrial case.
Particularly on Mars, tends to be large due to the low solar wind density, compared to Venus, at the Martian orbit (), and KHI is expected to be stabilized by compressibility (). Thus, the observation of KHI-like signatures around the Martian ionopause poses a fundamental question about the ubiquity of KHI in space plasmas, where a large density gradient across velocity-sheared boundaries is sometimes expected: What enables the KHI excitation even at a plasma boundary with a large density gradient? Understanding of the characteristics of KHI around the ionopause is also important for comprehending the ionospheric cold ion outflows from the Martian atmosphere ()
Using a comprehensive in situ plasma observation at Mars by MAVEN and MHD simulations of KHI, in this study, we investigate the characteristics of plasma boundaries with large density gradients and their effects on Kelvin–Helmholtz instability. Following the description of the instrumentation and model in Section 2, the results of the comparison between the observations and simulations are shown in Section 3. Based on observations, we propose a new realistic boundary structure for the velocity-sheared layer with a large density gradient based on entropy and conduct MHD simulations of KHI. In Section 4 and Section 5, discussions and conclusion are provided, respectively.
2 Instrumentation and model description
A comprehensive in situ observation of plasma at Mars by MAVEN (; ; ; ) provides an ideal opportunity to investigate the fundamental question described in Section 1. We used the data obtained in the MAVEN orbit #118 on 20 October 2014 from the MAG instrument () for the vector magnetic fields, STATIC ()/SWIA () for ion moments with/without mass discrimination, and LPW () for electron density in the ionosphere. We used SWIA density and velocity data only for the time period when the SupraThermal and Thermal Ion Composition (STATIC) energy coverage was limited due to its observation mode, as described in Section 3.1.
A high-resolution, numerically robust magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulation code CANS+ () is used to simulate KHI in velocity-sheared boundary layers with large density gradients. The nonlinear evolution of the physical quantities—plasma number density, pressure, velocity, and magnetic field B—is followed on the basis of MHD equations. We numerically solve the equations by using the fifth-order MP5 scheme () and the approximate Rieman solver of the HLLD scheme (). In order to compare traditional density-based and new entropy-based initial structures of the velocity-sheared boundary, we conducted two sets of two-dimensional MHD simulations. Two models of the boundary structure will be described in detail, together with observations, in Section 3.1. Based on the observations, the number density, velocity, temperature, and magnetic field strength in the shocked solar wind (ionosphere) side are set to 2 (104) cm−3, 177 (0) km/s, 275 (0.055) eV, and 8 (8) nT, respectively. It corresponds to . The total number of grid points used is 504 600. The spatial resolution is set as . Thus, the velocity shear layer is resolved with about 48 grids, and the resolution is good enough to reproduce the linear growth of KHI (). The settings for the two simulation runs other than the initial conditions are identical.
3 Results
3.1 Boundary observations by MAVEN and the entropy-based boundary structure model
Since Mars does not possess a global magnetic field, the solar wind directly interacts with the ionosphere. As it approaches Mars, the supersonic solar wind forms a bow shock in front of the planet (Figure 1), and the decelerated, shocked solar wind interacts with the dense ionosphere. At the boundary between the shocked solar wind and the ionosphere, the density gradient is large, with a typical density ratio of . A combination of mechanical and electrostatic attenuators of the STATIC instrument onboard MAVEN () enables continuous ion density measurements over four orders of magnitude, which is essential in order to reveal the detailed structure inside the boundary.
FIGURE 1
MAVEN observed an example of a velocity-sheared boundary with a large density gradient of between the shocked solar wind and dayside Martian ionosphere, as shown by the color codes and gray bars in Figure 1. The magnetic field in the ionosphere (light blue bar at the bottom in Figure 2) and shocked solar wind (orange) has a similar value (−8 nT) with some enhancement inside the boundary (the top panel in Figure 2). The high magnetic field strength at low altitudes is due to the localized crustal magnetic fields and will not have major effects on the global boundary structure. Alternating high and low energy populations are seen inside the boundary (second and third panels from the top of Figure 2), and increases in heavy ions at masses of −16 (O+) and 32 (O2+) coincide with the low energy populations (not shown). It is consistent with the density variations of each ion species shown in the fifth panel in Figure 2, i.e., O2+ is dominant in the ionosphere, while proton contribution is important in the shocked solar wind side. As the spacecraft traverses from the ionosphere to the shocked solar wind, the velocity increases from −0 to −177 km/s (sixth panel in Figure 2), while the density decreases from −6570 to 1.3 cm−3 (5th panel), i.e., , by taking averages for each region.
FIGURE 2

Summary of MAVEN observations in a large density gradient boundary between the shocked solar wind and the ionosphere. From the top of the figure, each panel shows magnetic field strength from the MAG instrument (
In order to investigate the location of the velocity shear relative to the density gradient, the observed relation between the density and velocity is determined and plotted in Figure 3A. In theoretical considerations (
FIGURE 3

Relations between ion density and velocity (A) observed in the large-density gradient boundary by MAVEN and (B) obtained in the MHD simulation with the entropy-based model as the initial condition. In panel (A), black dots show the ion density and velocity in the boundary interval observed by MAVEN (the same data shown in Figure 2 for the time interval indicated by the pink bar at the bottom of Figure 2), while red and blue lines display the newly proposed entropy-based model and classical density-based model, respectively, calculated based on parameters (green symbols) derived from observations in both ends of the boundary, i.e., the shocked solar wind (high speed and low density) and the ionosphere (low speed and high density). In panel (B), light blue and black dots indicate different time evolution stages, i.e., 116 (linear stage of the KHI development) and 209 (nonlinear stage), respectively, of the simulation run with the initial condition obtained from the observation-based entropy-based model (red line). We assumed L = 50 km for the calculation of .
FIGURE 4

Comparison between MHD simulations with two different boundary structures (red and blue lines in Figure 3A) as initial conditions. Panels (A) and (C) and (B) and (D) correspond to the density-based model and entropy-based model cases, respectively. Top panels show initial profiles of velocity (black line), density (blue), and the magnetosonic Mach number (red) across the boundary in normalized with the initial width of the velocity shear layer: . In these two cases, the velocity shear profile and physical values on each side of the shear layer are the same. On one hand, the relative location of the velocity shear to the large density gradient is different in the two cases, and the stability condition for KHI () is satisfied in most of the velocity shear region in the density-based model (A), as described in the text. Bottom panels display the flow pattern using the line integral convolution (LIC) technique (
In order to describe the observed boundary structure, we here introduce the entropy per unit mass, (, where indicates the thermal pressure), instead of the density, to construct an entropy-based model:where and show the entropy in the ionospheric and shocked solar wind sides, respectively. Figure 3A shows that the density–velocity relation with this entropy-based model (red line) agrees much better with observations than the density-based model (blue). It should be noted that the entropy is calculated under the assumption that the pressure is constant across the boundary. We investigated other MAVEN orbits that had comprehensive plasma data, including low-energy range observations by STATIC around the periapsis, which were available between 1 December 2014 and 26 January 2015. The observations show that all of the investigated boundary structure observations agree better with the entropy-based model than the density-based model. Compared to other physical parameters, such as momentum, to construct a new model, the entropy-based model shows the best agreement with the observation. We think it is natural to consider the boundary structure in which the entropy varies with the velocity since the density perturbation is theoretically transported by the entropy mode wave in the MHD approximation. In the next section, we use the traditional density-based and new entropy-based models as the initial conditions of the KHI simulations to observe the effects of the boundary model on momentum and mass transfers across the boundary by KHI.
3.2 MHD simulation results
We here conducted two-dimensional MHD simulations of KHI with a transverse magnetic field for the two initial conditions, i.e., the density-based model (Figure 4A) and entropy-based model (Figure 4B). The density, velocity, temperature, and magnetic field strength in the shocked solar wind (ionosphere) side are set to 2 (104) cm−3, 177 (0) km/s, 275 (0.055) eV, and 8 (8) nT based on observations shown in Section 3.1, respectively. These parameters correspond to . The settings for the two simulation runs other than the initial conditions are identical. Figure 3B shows the time evolution with the entropy-based initial condition (red line) at the early (light blue dots) and fully developed (black dots) stages of the KHI time evolution. The observed density–velocity relation (black dots in Figure 3A) resembles that of the early-stage KHI (light blue in Figure 3B), suggesting that KHI had already started to grow in the real Martian boundary.
The center upper part of Figure 4D shows a well-developed vortex with its center at approximately . The velocity of the vortex along the boundary was approximately 62 km/s. In contrast to the KHI vortex development with the entropy-based model in Figure 4D, we did not see any clear growth of KHI in the case of the density-based model (Figure 4C). In the density-based boundary structure, the magnetosonic Mach number (defined by the speed of sound and Alfvén velocity as ), in most parts of the velocity shear, becomes large enough () to suppress the KHI growth due to the compressibility (
4 Discussion
The real boundary structure with velocity shear and density gradient in space plasma reported here requires alteration of the initial boundary structure in theoretical studies of KHI to estimate mass and momentum transport across the boundary. In collisionless space plasmas, plasma mixing across the magnetic field lines occurs at small-scale structures, caused by secondary instabilities excited in the rolled-up vortex of KHI, i.e., at a well-developed KHI. To understand the momentum and mass transport mechanisms across the velocity-sheared boundary, high-resolution kinetic simulations of KHI have been conducted (
Although kinetic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations are important to investigate plasma mixing processes, MHD (
The specific entropy used to formulate the realistic boundary structure proposed in this study has been utilized to explore transport of plasma from the solar wind to various regions in the Earth’s magnetosphere (
The entropy-based model obtained in this study has no artificial peak in the magnetosonic Mach number and momentum inside the boundary, in contrast to the density-based model, as shown by the red lines in Figures 4A,B. It prevents the overestimation of mass and momentum transport. The observation also indicates that the realistic boundary structure in space plasma can facilitate KHI over a wide range of density gradients by evading compressibility suppression, and thus enabling the ubiquitous occurrence of Kelvin–Helmholtz instability in the plasma universe. It might explain the KHI occurrence reported in various space and astrophysical plasmas (
5 Conclusion
Based on comprehensive plasma observations by MAVEN at Mars, we investigated the real structure of velocity-sheared boundaries with a large density gradient (density ratio of 5000), and the two cases of MHD simulations of KHI with two different initial boundary structure models are compared. The results are as follows:
• The observations show that the boundary structure has a fundamental difference from the traditional density-based model used in previous simulation studies. Based on the observations, a new entropy-based boundary model is proposed.
• In the proposed entropy-based model, the relative location of the velocity shear to the density gradient changed so that the velocity shear is located in the lower-density region than in the density-based model.
• The comparison between simulations with two boundary models shows that KHI cannot develop in the density-based boundary model, while it can be excited in the entropy-based model due to the difference in compressibility effects at the velocity shear layer.
These results suggest that the suppression of KHI can be weakened in the realistic velocity-sheared boundary structure even when the density gradient across the boundary is large, and it can facilitate the ubiquitous occurrence of Kelvin–Helmholtz instability in various planetary magnetospheres and astrophysical plasmas. It will be useful to use the entropy-based boundary model for future simulation studies of velocity-sheared boundaries with a density gradient.
Statements
Data availability statement
The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found below. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) data are available from the NASA Planetary Data System (https://pds.nasa.gov) and the MAVEN Science Data Center (https://lasp.colorado.edu/maven/sdc/public/). The simulation data used in this study are available from the UTokyo Repository (https://repository.dl.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/).
Author contributions
KS: conceptualization, formal analysis, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, project administration, visualization, writing–original draft, and writing–review and editing. YM: investigation, methodology, validation, visualization, writing–review and editing, writing–original draft, and software. NT: conceptualization, validation, and writing–review and editing. TH: formal analysis, validation, writing–review and editing, and software. DB: validation, writing–review and editing, and investigation. HN: funding acquisition, writing–review and editing, and validation. JM: data curation, software, supervision, validation, and writing–review and editing. JH: data curation, validation, and writing–review and editing. SR: investigation and writing–review and editing. DM: data curation and writing–review and editing. LA: data curation, validation, writing–review and editing, and investigation. JE: data curation, validation, and writing–review and editing. DB: supervision and writing–review and editing. JL: supervision, writing–review and editing, and investigation. BJ: funding acquisition, resources, supervision, writing–review and editing, and project administration.
Funding
The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work is conducted under NASA’s MAVEN Participating Scientist Program (Proposal #12-MAVENPS12-0017, PI: KS). This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) #20H00192 and #22H00164 and Fostering Joint International Research (B) 18KK0093 by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank M. Fujimoto for useful discussion and J. E. P. Connerney for his contribution to MAG data.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors, and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
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Summary
Keywords
Kelvin–Helmholtz instability, Mars, density gradient, compressibility, cold plasma, MAVEN
Citation
Seki K, Matsumoto Y, Terada N, Hara T, Brain DA, Nakagawa H, McFadden JP, Halekas JS, Ruhunusiri S, Mitchell DL, Andersson L, Espley JR, Baker DN, Luhmann JG and Jakosky BM (2024) Characteristics of plasma boundaries with large density gradients and their effects on Kelvin–Helmholtz instability. Front. Astron. Space Sci. 11:1394817. doi: 10.3389/fspas.2024.1394817
Received
02 March 2024
Accepted
29 April 2024
Published
31 May 2024
Volume
11 - 2024
Edited by
Gian Luca Delzanno, Los Alamos National Laboratory (DOE), United States
Reviewed by
Kareem Sorathia, Johns Hopkins University, United States
Justin Holmes, Los Alamos National Laboratory (DOE), United States
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Copyright
© 2024 Seki, Matsumoto, Terada, Hara, Brain, Nakagawa, McFadden, Halekas, Ruhunusiri, Mitchell, Andersson, Espley, Baker, Luhmann and Jakosky.
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*Correspondence: K. Seki, k.seki@eps.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Disclaimer
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.