Abstract
In the nightside region of Earth’s magnetosphere, buoyancy modes have
been associated with low entropy bubbles. These bubbles form in the
plasma sheet, particularly during substorm expansion, and move rapidly
earthward and come to rest in the inner plasma sheet or inner
magnetosphere. They often exhibit damped oscillations with periods of a
few minutes and have been associated with Pi2 pulsations. In previous
work, we used the thin filament approximation to compare the frequencies
and modes of buoyancy waves using three approaches: magnetohydrodynamic
(MHD) ballooning theory, classic interchange theory, and an idealized
formula. Interchange oscillations differ from the more general MHD
oscillations in that they assume a constant pressure on each magnetic
field line. It was determined that the buoyancy and interchange modes
are very similar for field lines that extend into the plasma sheet but
differ for field lines that map to the inner magnetosphere. In this
paper, we create a small region of entropy depletion in an otherwise
stable entropy background profile of the magnetotail to represent the
presence of a plasma bubble and determine the properties of the buoyancy
modes using the same 3 approaches. In the bubble region, we find that in
some regions the interchange and buoyancy modes overlap resulting in
frequencies that are much lower than the background. In other regions
within the bubble, we find interchange unstable modes while in other
locations MHD normal mode predicts an MHD slow mode wave solution which
is not found in the pure interchange solution.