Generation of turbulence in colliding reconnection jets

Abstract

The collision of magnetic reconnection jets is studied by means of a three dimensional numerical simulation at kinetic scale, in the presence of a strong guide field. We show that turbulence develops due to the jets collision producing several current sheets in reconnection outflows, aligned with the guide field direction. The turbulence is mainly two-dimensional, with stronger gradients in the plane perpendicular to the guide field and a low wave-like activity in the parallel direction. First, we provide a numerical method to isolate the central turbulent region. Second, we analyze spatial second-order structure function and prove that turbulence is confined in this region. Finally, we compute local magnetic and electric frequency spectra, finding a trend in the sub-ion range that differs from typical cases for which the Taylor hypothesis is valid, as well as wave activity in the range between ion and electron cyclotron frequencies. Our results are relevant to understand observations of reconnection jets collisions in space plasmas.

16 pages, 10 figures

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• Influence of ion-to-electron temperature ratio on tearing instability and resulting subion-scale turbulence in a low-${\beta }_e$ collisionless plasma
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• Regimes of charged particle dynamics in current sheets: the machine learning approach
• Anisotropic electron heating in turbulence-driven magnetic reconnection in the near-Sun solar wind
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