Bremen 2017 – scientific programme

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EP: Fachverband Extraterrestrische Physik

EP 7: Sonne und Heliosphäre II

EP 7.6: Talk

Wednesday, March 15, 2017, 10:00–10:15, GW2 B2880

The role of electron-scale turbulence in 3D guide field magnetic reconnection — •Patricio Muñoz and Jörg Büchner — Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung, Göttingen, Germany

The role of plasma turbulence in magnetic reconnection is fundamental to understand energy dissipation in laboratory, space and astrophysical plasmas. Previous studies have mostly focused in Alfvénic/low-frequency turbulence, but the effects of self-consistently generated turbulence by kinetic electron-scale instabilities in collisionless plasmas have remained mostly unknown.

We aim to explain features of the high frequency turbulence which develops during magnetic reconnection in laboratory experiments like MRX and VINETA-II, as well as of current in-situ measurements in the Earth’s magnetosphere by the MMS spacecraft.

For this sake, we carried out 3D fully-kinetic Particle-in-Cell (PiC) code numerical simulations of force free current sheets with a guide magnetic field, a common situation in the plasma environments of interest. We show that the dynamically evolving kinetic turbulence spectra in reconnecting current sheets is broadband and develops starting from the lower-hybrid frequency to the kinetic electron-scale. The evolution of the turbulence spectra correlates with the growth and rate of magnetic reconnection and can be explained by (kinetic) streaming instabilities and waves, mostly due to the electron current.