Pressure-Strain Interaction: III. Particle-in-Cell Simulations of Magnetic Reconnection

Abstract

How energy is converted into thermal energy in weakly collisional and collisionless plasma processes such as magnetic reconnection and plasma turbulence has recently been the subject of intense scrutiny. The pressure-strain interaction has emerged as an important piece, as it describes the rate of conversion between bulk flow and thermal energy density. In two companion studies, we presented an alternate decomposition of the pressure-strain interaction to isolate the effects of converging/diverging flow and flow shear instead of compressible and incompressible flow, and we derived the pressure-strain interaction in magnetic field-aligned coordinates. Here, we use these results to study pressure-strain interaction during two-dimensional anti-parallel magnetic reconnection. We perform particle-in-cell simulations and plot the decompositions in both Cartesian and magnetic field-aligned coordinates. We identify the mechanisms contributing to positive and negative pressure-strain interaction during reconnection. This study provides a roadmap for interpreting numerical and observational data of the pressure-strain interaction, which should be important for studies of reconnection, turbulence, and collisionless shocks.

18 pages, 7 figures, accepted to Physics of Plasmas

References in corpus (11)

• New Measure of the Dissipation Region in Collisionless Magnetic Reconnection
• Evidence for Electron Landau Damping in Space Plasma Turbulence
• Measuring Collisionless Damping in Heliospheric Plasmas using Field-Particle Correlations
• First-Principles Theory of the Rate of Magnetic Reconnection in Magnetospheric and Solar Plasmas
• Pressure-Strain Interaction as the Energy Dissipation Estimate in Collisionless Plasma
• Energy Dissipation in Turbulent Reconnection
• The Importance of Electron Landau Damping for the Dissipation of Turbulent Energy in Terrestrial Magnetosheath Plasma
• Pressure-Strain Interaction: I. On Compression, Deformation, and Implications For Pi-D
• Quantifying Energy Conversion in Higher Order Phase Space Density Moments in Plasmas
• Pressure-Strain Interaction: III. Particle-in-Cell Simulations of Magnetic Reconnection
• Pressure-Strain Interaction: II. Decomposition in Magnetic Field-Aligned Coordinates

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Pressure-Strain Interaction: I. On Compression, Deformation, and Implications For Pi-D
• Quantifying Energy Conversion in Higher Order Phase Space Density Moments in Plasmas
• Pressure-Strain Interaction: III. Particle-in-Cell Simulations of Magnetic Reconnection
• Pressure-Strain Interaction: II. Decomposition in Magnetic Field-Aligned Coordinates
• Higher-order nonequilibrium term: Effective power density quantifying evolution towards or away from local thermodynamic equilibrium