SH051-0003
Particle Acceleration in Electron-only Reconnection in the Low Electron Beta Regime

Wednesday, 16 December 2020
Poster
Cristian Vega, University of Wisconsin Madison, Physics, Madison, WI, United States, Stas Boldyrev, University of Wisconsin Madison, Madison, WI, United States, Vadim Roytershteyn, Space Science Institute, Boulder, CO, United States and Gian Luca Delzanno, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, United States
Abstract:
Recently it has been proposed that a new regime of kinetic-scale turbulence can exist in plasma environments with low electron beta (Earth’s magnetosheath, regions close to the solar corona, etc.), termed inertial kinetic-Alfvén turbulence. The existence of this regime was confirmed by numerical simulations presented in [1]. Furthermore, electron-only reconnection events, previously found in the Earth’s magnetosheath by the NASA Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission [2], were also detected in 2D numerical simulations of inertial kinetic-Alfvén turbulence ran with particle-in-cell code VPIC [3]. In this presentation we study particle acceleration in these reconnection events in the low electron beta regime.

[1] – Roytershteyn, V., Boldyrev, S., Delzanno, G. L., Chen, C. H. K., Groselj, D., Loureiro, N. F., 2019, The Astrophysical Journal, 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, The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 893, L10.

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