Related papers: Electron-only Reconnection in Ion-scale Current Sh…
We investigate the accuracy with which the reconnection electric field $E_M$ can be determined from in-situ plasma data. We study the magnetotail electron diffusion region observed by NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) on 2017-07-11 at…
Data from the NASA Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission are used to investigate asymmetric magnetic reconnection at the dayside boundary between the Earth's magnetosphere and the solar wind (the magnetopause). High-resolution…
There is ample evidence for magnetic reconnection in the solar system, but it is a nontrivial task to visualize, to determine the proper approaches and frames to study, and in turn to elucidate the physical processes at work in reconnection…
We analyze a high-resolution simulation of magnetopause reconnection observed by the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission and explain the occurrence of strongly localized dissipation with an amplitude more than an order of magnitude…
Magnetic reconnection occurring in collisionless environments is a multi-scale process involving both ion and electron kinetic processes. Because of their small mass, the electron scales are difficult to resolve in numerical and satellite…
The stability of electron current sheets embedded within the reconnection exhaust is studied with a 3D fully kinetic particle-in-cell simulation. The electron current layers studied here form self-consistently in a reconnection regime with…
We study numerically small-scale reconnection events in kinetic, low-frequency, quasi-2D turbulence (termed kinetic-Alfv\'en turbulence). Using 2D particle-in-cell simulations, we demonstrate that such turbulence generates reconnection…
Magnetic reconnection requires the violation of the frozen-in condition which ties gyrating charged particles to the magnetic field inhibiting diffusion. Ongoing reconnection has been identified in near-Earth space as being responsible for…
Using a kinetic simulation of magnetic reconnection it was recently shown that magnetic-field-aligned electric fields (E||) can be present over large spatial scales in reconnection exhausts. The largest values of E|| are observed within…
We compare case studies of Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS)-observed magnetopause electron diffusion regions (EDRs) to determine how the rate of work done by the electric field,…
We report Magnetospheric Multiscale observations of electron pressure gradient electric fields near a magnetic reconnection diffusion region using a new technique for extracting 7.5 ms electron moments from the Fast Plasma Investigation. We…
Contrary to all the 2D models, where the reconnection x-line extent is infinitely long, we study magnetic reconnection in the opposite limit. The scaling of the average reconnection rate and outflow speed are modeled as a function of the…
We present 3D simulations of semirelativistic collisionless magnetic reconnection, where upstream ions are subrelativistic while electrons are ultrarelativistic. We employ the realistic proton-to-electron mass ratio and explore a range of…
We propose that magnetic reconnection at the heliopause only occurs where the interstellar magnetic field points nearly anti-parallel to the heliospheric field. By using large-scale magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of the heliosphere…
3D kinetic-scale turbulence is studied numerically in the regime where electrons are strongly magnetized (the ratio of plasma species pressure to magnetic pressure is $\beta_e=0.1$ for electrons and $\beta_i=1$ for ions). Such a regime is…
Many in-situ spacecraft observations have demonstrated that magnetic reconnection in the Earth's magnetotail is largely controlled by the pre-reconnection current sheet configuration. One of the most important thin current sheet…
We present detailed analysis of the turbulence observed in three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations of magnetic reconnection at the magnetopause. The parameters are representative of an electron diffusion region encounter of the…
Magnetic reconnection changes the magnetic field topology and powers explosive events in astrophysical, space and laboratory plasmas. For flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) in the solar atmosphere, the standard model predicts the…
Electron dynamics surrounding the X-line in magnetopause-type asymmetric reconnection is investigated using a two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulation. We study electron properties of three characteristic regions in the vicinity of the…
Particle dynamics in the electron current layer in collisionless magnetic reconnection is investigated by using a particle-in-cell simulation. Electron motion and velocity distribution functions are studied by tracking self-consistent…