Relation Between Electrostatic Solitary Waves and Hot Plasma Flow in the Plasma Sheet Boundary Layer: Geotail Observations

H. Kojima, H. Matsumoto, T. Miyatake, I. Nagano, A. Fujita, L. A. Frank, T. Mukai, W. R. Paterson, Y. Saito, S. Machida, R. R. Anderson.
Geophys, Res. Lett., 21, 2919-2922, 1994.

Most of the BEN wave forms observed by Geotail in the Plasma Sheet Boundary Layer (PSBL) appear as a series of isolated spiky pulses which are termed "Electrostatic Solitary Waves (ESW)." Comparison between the BEN observations and plasma measurements shows that the uppermost frequency of the ESW is closely related to the temperature of the flowing ions in the PSBL. We also find that the observed spike width of the ESW and the inter-pulse time-span change very rapidly on time scales ranging from a few milliseconds to a few hundreds of milliseconds, suggesting that the speed of the ESW potential changes very rapidly.