Signatures of magnetic reconnection at boundaries of interplanetary small-scale magnetic flux ropes

TL;DR

This study investigates magnetic reconnection signatures at the boundaries of small-scale interplanetary flux ropes, revealing that a significant fraction exhibit reconnection features similar to magnetic clouds, with occurrence rates varying over the solar cycle.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of reconnection signatures at small flux rope boundaries and their variation with solar activity, linking reconnection to flux rope evolution and solar wind interactions.

Findings

42% of flux ropes show reconnection signatures at boundaries.

Reconnection events are more frequent near solar minima.

Most reconnection occurs with anti-parallel magnetic fields.

Abstract

The interaction between interplanetary small-scale magnetic flux ropes and the magnetic field in the ambient solar wind is an important topic to understand- ing the evolution of magnetic structures in the heliosphere. Through a survey of 125 previously reported small flux ropes from 1995 to 2005, we find that 44 of them reveal clear signatures of Alfvenic fluctuations, and thus classify them into Alfven wave trains rather than flux ropes. Signatures of magnetic reconnection, generally including a plasma jet of ~30 km/s within a magnetic field rotational region, are clearly present at boundaries of about 42% of the flux ropes and 14% of the wave trains. The reconnection exhausts are often observed to show a local increase in the proton temperature, density and plasma beta. About 66% of the reconnection events at flux rope boundaries are associated with a magnetic field shear angle larger than 90 deg and 73% of them reveal a decrease by 20% or more in the magnetic field magnitude, suggesting a dominance of anti-parallel reconnec- tion at flux rope boundaries. The occurrence rate of magnetic reconnection at flux rope boundaries through the year of 1995 to 2005 is also investigated and we find that it is relatively low around solar maximum and much higher when ap- proaching solar minima. The average magnetic field depression and shear angle for reconnection events at flux rope boundaries also reveal a similar trend from 1995 to 2005. Our results demonstrate for the first time that boundaries of a substantial fraction of small-scale flux ropes have properties similar to those of magnetic clouds, in the sense that both of them exhibit signatures of magnetic reconnection. The observed reconnection signatures could be related either to the formation of small flux ropes, or to the interaction between flux ropes and the interplanetary magnetic fields.