English

Electron and Ion Heating during Magnetic Reconnection in Weakly Collisional Plasmas

Plasma Physics 2015-04-14 v2

Abstract

Gyrokinetic simulations of magnetic reconnection are presented to investigate plasma heating for strongly magnetized, weakly collisional plasmas. For a low plasma beta case, parallel and perpendicular phase mixing strongly enhance energy dissipation yielding electron heating. Heating occurs for a long time period after a dynamical process of magnetic reconnection ended. For a higher beta case, the ratio of ion to electron dissipation rate increases, suggesting that ion heating (via phase-mixing) may become an important dissipation channel in high beta plasmas.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1311.2728,
  title  = {Electron and Ion Heating during Magnetic Reconnection in Weakly Collisional Plasmas},
  author = {Ryusuke Numata and Nuno F. Loureiro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1311.2728},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

9 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in JPSJ Suppl. [Proceedings of the 12th Asia Pacific Physics Conference]