The relationship between collisionless plasma turbulence and electron-only reconnection: Magnetospheric Multiscale observations from Earth’s magnetosheath
Collisionless Dynamics
Julia
Stawarz
Date Submitted
2021-04-30 00:00:00
Imperial College London
J. E. Stawarz (Imperial College London), J. P. Eastwood (Imperial College London), T. D. Phan (University of California Berkeley), I. L. Gingell (University of Southampton), P. Sharma Pyakurel (University of California Berkeley), and M. A. Shay (University of Delaware)
Earth’s magnetosheath is filled with complex, highly nonlinear fluctuations known as turbulence that generate a multitude of small-scale current sheets. Previous studies have shown that these current sheets can be potential locations for magnetic reconnection and recent high resolution, multi-spacecraft measurements from NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission have begun to reveal that in some cases the reconnection events may occur without forming ion jets – so-called electron-only magnetic reconnection. However, the interplay between these reconnection events and the turbulence remains an important open question for understanding the dynamics and dissipation of collisionless plasma turbulence. In this study, we perform a detailed survey of 60 intervals of magnetosheath turbulence observed by MMS. Within each interval, characteristic properties of the turbulence are determined and several hundred individual magnetic reconnection events are systematically identified, including both reconnection events with and without ion jets. It is found that thinner reconnecting current sheets with faster electron outflows, consistent with electron-only reconnection, tend to occur in intervals with shorter magnetic correlation lengths – shorter than a few tens of ion inertial lengths. The results may have implications for how turbulent dissipation partitions energy between ions and electrons in collisionless plasma systems.
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