Complexity in the Earth’s magnetotail plasma sheet Original Research Article

The Earth’s magnetotail plasma sheet acts as a reservoir of energy and particles for magnetospheric processes, and is now well recognized to behave as a nonlinear complex system. Several recent studies have provided strong evidence for the multiscale, cross-coupling, and re-organization processes in the magnetotail plasma sheet phenomena, suggesting that new approaches may be useful to provide new insight on the complex nature of the dynamics of this region. Here, after a brief review of some recent results on the complexity of plasma sheet dynamics, we discuss the relevance of randomness in the magnetic field fluctuations by means of simulated statistical pattern. In detail, we show how scale-invariance properties, which resemble actual measurement features, can be observed also in simple static random model. The results are also discussed in connection with a complex topology of the geotail currents.