Turbulence analysis in the reconnection exhaust of 3D PIC numerical simulation of magnetic reconnection

May 18, 2016, 2:45 PM
8h 15m
Pand

Pand

Speaker

Dr Francesco PUCCI (KU Leuven)

Description

Turbulence is the physical phenomenon responsible for the cascade of energy from large scales, where energy is injected, to small scales, where the energy can eventually be dissipated. Turbulence is ubiquitous in space plasmas and its features in the different regions of the heliosphere (like solar wind, magnetosphere, solar corona ...), along with the mechanisms at small scale responsible for dissipation, are still subject of studies. An interesting topic is understanding the relationship between turbulence and magnetic reconnection. It has already been known, in fact, that this two phenomena are strictly linked in space plasmas (Matthaeus and Velli, SSR, 2011). Recently, data analysis of turbulence generated within a high-speed reconnection jet in the terrestrial magnetotail were performed using multipoint in-situ measurements from the Cluster spacecraft (Osman et al., ApJL, 2015). The authors showed that in the outflow region of a reconnection site turbulence is at play forming localized coherent structures by an intermittent cascade. In this work, we use high resolution 3D PIC numerical simulation data to study the features of the turbulence that develops in the outflow regions of magnetic reconnection (Lapenta et al., Nature Phys., 2015). We analyze temporal and spacial spectra of the fluctuations and higher order structure functions and discuss how energy is transmitted from fields to particles. We compare the numerical results with observations.

Primary author

Dr Francesco PUCCI (KU Leuven)

Co-authors

Prof. Francesco MALARA (Università della Calabria) Giovanni LAPENTA (KULeuven) Prof. Vyacheslav OLSHEVSKYI (KU Leuven) Prof. William MATTHAEUS (University of Delaware)

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