BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Astron. Space Sci.
Sec. Space Physics
This article is part of the Research TopicEnergy Transfer And Exchange With Low-Energy Plasma Via Cross-Energy And Cross-Scale Interactions Throughout The MagnetosphereView all 7 articles
Evolution of Electron-to-Ion Temperature Ratio of Cold Plasma in the Lobes
Provisionally accepted
- 1Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China
- 2Institute of Geology and Geophysics Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
- 3Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen, Munich, Germany
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Cold plasma of ionospheric origin, with energies less than a few tens of electronvolts, dominates the plasma population in the magnetosphere and plays a crucial role in magnetospheric dynamics. Although the velocity distribution of cold plasma in the magnetotail is measured, little is known about the changes in its temperatures, because of the difficulty in direct measurement of the cold plasma. In this study, we examine the electric field measurements in the plasma wake, which is created by the charged spacecraft interacting with the cold plasma flow, to infer the changes in the electron-to-ion temperature ratio of the cold plasma. We present the observations from the Cluster mission in the years 2001-2010, and the distributions of the observed electric potential drop in the plasma wake. The results confirm the correlation between the wake potential and the plasma flow speed and indicate that the electron-to-ion temperature ratio of the cold plasma decreases with increasing geocentric distance, suggesting that electrons are heated differently from ions as the cold plasma is transported into the tail.
Keywords: cold plasma, Temperature ratio, Spacecraft potential, Magnetotail lobes, Plasma wake
Received: 11 Aug 2025; Accepted: 05 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Li, Chen, Chai, Kronberg and Doepke. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Kun Li, likun37@mail.sysu.edu.cn
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