SIGNATURES OF MAGNETIC RECONNECTION AT BOUNDARIES OF INTERPLANETARY SMALL-SCALE MAGNETIC FLUX ROPES

The interaction between interplanetary small-scale magnetic flux ropes and the magnetic field in the ambient solar wind is an important topic in the understanding of the evolution of magnetic structures in the heliosphere. Through a survey of 125 previously reported small flux ropes from 1995 to 2005, we find that 44 of them reveal clear signatures of Alfvenic fluctuations and thus classify them as Alfven wave trains rather than flux ropes. Signatures of magnetic reconnection, generally including a plasma jet of similar to 30 km s(-1) within a magnetic field rotational region, are clearly present at boundaries of about 42% of the flux ropes and 14% of the wave trains. The reconnection exhausts are often observed to show a local increase in the proton temperature, density, and plasma beta. About 66% of the reconnection events at flux rope boundaries are associated with a magnetic field shear angle larger than 90 and 73% of them reveal a decrease of 20% or more in the magnetic field magnitude, suggesting a dominance of anti-parallel reconnection at flux rope boundaries. The occurrence rate of magnetic reconnection at flux rope boundaries through the years 1995-2005 is also investigated and we find that it is relatively low around the solar maximum and much higher when approaching solar minima. The average magnetic field depression and shear angle for reconnection events at flux rope boundaries also reveal a similar trend from 1995 to 2005. Our results demonstrate for the first time that boundaries of a substantial fraction of small-scale flux ropes have properties similar to those of magnetic clouds, in the sense that both of them exhibit signatures of magnetic reconnection. The observed reconnection signatures could be related either to the formation of small flux ropes or to the interaction between flux ropes and the interplanetary magnetic fields.