Existence of electrostatic solitary waves during dayside reconnection at Mars

The magnetic field and plasma measurements from the mars atmosphere and volatile evolution mission have shown magnetic reconnection events at the Martian-induced magnetopause (IMP) boundary. This paper studies the ion-acoustic solitary waves in an unmagnetized plasma consisting of fluid O+ and superthermal O2+ ions from the Martian atmosphere, and fluid H+ ions and superthermal electrons from the solar wind, at an altitude between 600–800 km at the Martian IMP during a magnetic reconnection event. The Sagdeev pseudopotential technique is used to analyze solitary waves with arbitrary amplitude. The effect of temperature, superthermality, Mach number, and ion density on solitary structures is studied for cold as well as finite-temperature plasma. The theoretical model predicts positive potential solitons having bipolar electric fields with amplitudes ∼(1.6–389) mV/m, with pulse duration ∼(0.1–1.6) ms for the case of cold plasma. With finite ion temperature, the amplitude varies between ∼(1–14) mV/m, with pulse duration ∼(0.3–0.9) ms, which is comparable to the values observed within the magnetosheath region. This study shows the possibility of the existence of electrostatic solitary structures within the Martian reconnection region.