Two-fluid ten-moment studies of drift instabilities in magnetotail current sheets

The integration of kinetic effects in fluid models is an important problem in global simulations of the Earth's magnetosphere and space weather modelling. We introduce a two fluid ten-moment model, which includes the evolution of the pressure tensor. Here we focus on current sheets in the magnetosphere, which can be unstable to drift instabilities such as the drift-kink, or the lower hybrid drift instability. Although there have been previous fluid studies of these instabilities [1], there are some discrepancies between their predictions and those of kinetic models [2]. We show that the ten moment model improves the agreement between the fluid and kinetic models, especially for the kink instability. In addition, we study the ballooning instability and its interaction with reconnection in driven and undriven magnetotail like current sheets.