Diffusive Transport Particle Simulations of Cold and Hot Ions Under Northward Interplanetary Magnetic Field

The main difference seen in the plasma sheet between northward interplanetary magnetic field (NIMF) and southward interplanetary magnetic field (SIMF) intervals is that the plasma sheet is colder and denser during NIMF [e.g., Terasawa et al., 1997]. The basic processes responsible for these changes in the plasma sheet during NIMF and SIMF are not fully understood. The plasma sheet densities increase gradually following a northward turning of the IMF [Wing et al., 2005], and the density change is associated with a < ~1 keV cold population near the flanks. Observations also show a large variation in density across the tail with higher densities near the flanks than at midnight [e.g., Wing and Newell.,2002; Wang et al., 2006], which suggests that there are transport processes that allow the cold particles access to the midnight sector from the flanks. It has been proposed [e.g., Terasawa et al., 1997; Antonova, 2006] that diffusion may transport cold particles from the flanks deep into the plasma sheet. Diffusive particle transport results from fluctuations in the plasma sheet flow in the presence of a spatial gradient in the particle number. In this study we add electric and magnetic field perturbations to the background Tsyganenko 2001 (T01) magnetic field and Weimer 2000 electric potential with the superposition of different waves to determine whether diffusive transport can account for the gradual cooling and densification of the plasma sheet during NIMF. We follow the guiding center drift and full particle drift, where appropriate, of over 20,000 protons with arbitrary pitch angles and energies from 32 eV-30 keV in the simulation region from X = -10 to -50 and |Y| < 20 RE .We then obtain particle distributions by mapping the phase space densities to realistic source distributions based on THEMIS and Geotail observations and compute the resulting plasma moments. We investigate if diffusion can transport colder ions more efficiently than the hotter ions from the flanks to form a colder and denser plasma sheet.