Speaker
Description
Mirror waves are widely observed in space plasma environments. The mirror instability may occur in anisotropic plasmas where the perpendicular temperature exceeds the parallel temperature. An important characteristic of mirror waves is the anticorrelation between plasma density and magnetic field perturbations. Moreover, recent observations have indicated an anticorrelation between temperature and magnetic field perturbations. The linear mixed kinetic-MHD theory may quantitatively describe the phase relations of the observed mirror waves in the terrestrial magnetosheath (Hau and Chang 2020; Hau et al. 2021). In this study, we investigate the time evolution of proton mirror instability based on hybrid particle simulation model for 20 sets of initial plasma beta values. Our findings have shown that the observed mirror events in terms of phase relationships can be quantitatively reproduced by nonlinear simulation results. The statistical analyses indicate that the saturated phase relations are consistent with the theoretical predictions.
