Electron-only reconnection in 3D plasma turbulence in the low electron beta regime

POSTER

Abstract

A new regime of kinetic-scale plasma turbulence, consisting of inertial kinetic Alfven modes, has been shown to exist in plasma environments with low electron beta (Earth magnetosheath, regions close to the solar corona, etc) [1]. In this work we use spectral code SPS to run a 3D simulation of decaying turbulence in such a plasma environment. We look for indicators of electron-only reconnection, previously found by the MMS mission [2], and identify and characterize a few reconnection sites, expanding on our previous study of 2.5D kinetic-scale turbulence [3|.
 


[1] - Roytershteyn, V., Boldyrev, S., Delzanno, G. L., Chen, C. H. K., Groselj, D., Loureiro, N. F., 2019, ApJ, 870, 103.


[2] - Phan, T. D., Eastwood, J. P., Shay, M. A., et al. 2018, Nature, 557, 202.

[3] - Vega, C.,  Roytershteyn , V., Delzanno, G. L., Boldyrev, S., 2020 ApJL 893 L10.

*This research was supported by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) through its Center for Space and Earth Science (CSES). CSES is funded by LANL's Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program under project number 20210528CR. The work is also partly supported by NSF under Grants PHY-1707272 and PHY-2010098, by NASA under Grant NASA 80NSSC18K0646, and by the Wisconsin Plasma Physics Laboratory (US Department of Energy Grant DE-SC0018266).

Presenters

  • Cristian S Vega

    • University of Wisconsin - Madison

Authors

  • Cristian S Vega

    • University of Wisconsin - Madison

  • Vadim S Roytershteyn

    • Space Science Institute

  • Gian Luca Delzanno

    • Los Alamos National Laboratory

  • Stanislav A Boldyrev

    • University of Wisconsin - Madison