Ion and electron heating during magnetic reconnection in weakly collisional plasmas

Abstract

Magnetic reconnection and associated heating of ions and electrons in strongly magnetised, weakly collisional plasmas are studied by means of gyrokinetic simulations. It is shown that an appreciable amount of the released magnetic energy is dissipated to yield (irreversible) electron and ion heating via phase mixing. Electron heating is mostly localized to the magnetic island, not the current sheet, and occurs after the dynamical reconnection stage. Ion heating is comparable to electron heating only in high-beta plasmas, and results from both parallel phase mixing and perpendicular phase mixing due to finite Larmor radius effects; in space, ion heating is localized to the interior of a secondary island (plasmoid) that arises from the instability of the current sheet.

16 pages, 13 figures, submitted to J. Plasma Phys.; replaced to match published version

References in corpus (4)

• Instability of current sheets and formation of plasmoid chains
• The Mechanisms of Electron Heating and Acceleration during Magnetic Reconnection
• Linearized model Fokker-Planck collision operators for gyrokinetic simulations. I. Theory
• Collisionless Reconnection in the Large Guide Field Regime: Gyrokinetic Versus Particle-in-Cell Simulations

Cited by in corpus (34)

• The role of three-dimensional transport in driving enhanced electron acceleration during magnetic reconnection
• The role of electron heating physics in images and variability of the Galactic Centre black hole Sagittarius A*
• The Disc-Jet Symbiosis Emerges: Modeling the Emission of Sagittarius A* with Electron Thermodynamics
• Electron and proton heating in trans-relativistic magnetic reconnection
• Parallel electric fields are inefficient drivers of energetic electrons in magnetic reconnection
• Disruption of Alfvénic turbulence by magnetic reconnection in a collisionless plasma
• Formation of Power-law Electron Energy Spectra in Three-dimensional Low-$\beta$ Magnetic Reconnection
• Diagnosing collisionless energy transfer using field-particle correlations: gyrokinetic turbulence
• Fully kinetic versus reduced-kinetic modelling of collisionless plasma turbulence
• The Structure of Plasma Heating in Gyrokinetic Alfvénic Turbulence
• A Prospectus on Kinetic Heliophysics
• Laguerre-Hermite Pseudo-Spectral Velocity Formulation of Gyrokinetics
• Dissipation measures in weakly-collisional plasmas
• Viriato: a Fourier-Hermite spectral code for strongly magnetised fluid-kinetic plasma dynamics
• Energy Dissipation and Landau Damping in Two- and Three-Dimensional Plasma Turbulence
• Decomposition of Plasma Kinetic Entropy into Position and Velocity Space and the Use of Kinetic Entropy in Particle-in-Cell Simulations
• Collisionless energy transfer in kinetic turbulence: field-particle correlations in Fourier space
• Nonlinear Reconnection in Magnetized Turbulence
• Radiative Properties of Magnetically-Arrested Disks
• Identification of active magnetic reconnection using magnetic flux transport in plasma turbulence
• Kinetic Entropy-Based Measures of Distribution Function Non-Maxwellianity: Theory and Simulations
• The onset of electron-only reconnection
• Gyrokinetic and kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of guide-field reconnection. I: Macroscopic effects of the electron flows
• Gyrokinetic turbulence: between idealized estimates and a detailed analysis of nonlinear energy transfers
• Plasmoid instability in the semi-collisional regime
• Resonant whistler-electron interactions: MMS observations vs. test-particle simulation
• Influence of ion-to-electron temperature ratio on tearing instability and resulting subion-scale turbulence in a low-${\beta }_e$ collisionless plasma
• A Hybrid Gyrokinetic Ion and Isothermal Electron Fluid Code for Astrophysical Plasma
• Observational Constraints on Direct Electron Heating in the Hot Accretion Flows in Sgr A* and M87*
• Destabilization mechanism of the collisional microtearing mode in magnetized slab plasmas
• Investigation of the collisionless plasmoid instability based on gyrofluid and gyrokinetic integrated approach
• Characterizing Velocity-Space Signatures of Electron Energization in Large-Guide-Field Collisionless Magnetic Reconnection
• PATOKA: Simulating Electromagnetic Observables of Black Hole Accretion
• Random forcing with a constant power input for two-dimensional gyrokinetic simulations