Interplay of magnetic reconnection and current sheet instabilities in near-Earth plasmas

Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental process in plasma physics and a major cause of energy conversion and transport through magnetic field topology reconfiguration. Reconnection is a key mechanism in the Earth’s magnetosphere, where it promotes plasmas mixing and drives geomagnetic storm and substorm activity. Together with reconnection, several other current sheet-related processes, such as a variety of kinking instabilities and waves perturb the magnetotail. We present recent studies investigating the interplay of reconnection and instabilities at different scales, by means of Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) observations at the electron scales and Vlasiator global hybrid-Vlasov simulations picturing the entire magnetosphere. MMS observations allow shedding light on the fine electron scales and they reveal that the presence of waves could perturb the established two-dimensional laminar picture of thin current sheets. Global hybrid-Vlasov magnetospheric simulations are a powerful tool to put MMS observations in the larger magnetospheric context. Recent results from the Vlasiator hybrid-Vlasov simulation suggest that the efficiency of the reconnection process is affected by the development of kinking instability in the magnetotail current sheet.