Advances in magnetopause Kelvin-Helmholtz instability studies

This paper reviews different topics concerning the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability at the terrestrial magnetopause: role in the magnetopause transfers, experimental observations, linear theory, and numerical simulations. Two main questions are raised from this review: (i) is the role of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability to be opposed to the one of reconnection, or are both phenomena to be considered as complementary? (ii) why are the measured surface wavelengths much longer than predicted by the linear theory? We present new results of numerical simulations which may allow to answer these two questions.