Energy exchanges and particle acceleration in turbulent reconnection outflow

Abstract:

Reconnection is often associated with turbulence in space and laboratory observations. Reconnection acts as a wind tunnel experiment: it causes fast and highly structured and very confined flows that have several sources of instabilities (density and temperature gradients, anisotropy, unfavorable magnetic curvature, beam-plasma and beam-beam instabilities). The non-linear development of these instabilities causes the formation of a turbulent cascade. Different configurations of different reconnecting plasmas and even different regions around the same reconnection site can lead to different turbulent spectra with different properties for the different fields and plasma moments.

We report results of different 3D particle in cell (PIC) simulations done for different conditions found in space, around the Earth, in the magnetotail, in the dayside, in the solar wind and in the solar corona. We analyze these complex turbulent flows and design diagnostics that can pick up energy exchanges in different regions and measure the local energy exchange rates. We further analyze the particle populations and detect the response of the particles to the turbulent fluctuation determining the processes of energy gain and loss that form beams, high energy tails and other features in the particle velocity distribution.