Journal article
Turbulent heating due to magnetic reconnection
Physics of plasmas, Vol.25(1), 012304
01/01/2018
DOI: 10.1063/1.4993423
Abstract
Dissipation of plasma turbulent energy is a phenomenon having significant implications for the heating of the solar corona and solar wind. While processes involving linear wave damping, stochastic heating, and reconnection have been postulated as contributors to heating mechanisms, the relative role that they play is not currently understood. In this manuscript, we establish a theoretical framework for applying reconnection heating predictions to turbulent systems. Kinetic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations are used to study heating due to reconnection, and these results are then adapted to a turbulent medium. First, the factors controlling the heating of plasmas in reconnection exhausts are examined using laminar reconnection simulations; predictions for heating are determined which require only the plasma conditions just upstream of the reconnection diffusion region as input. The laminar predictions are then applied to PIC simulations of turbulence. Key assumptions are: (1) the plasma conditions just upstream of the diffusion region are consistent with Kolmogorov scaling of turbulent fluctuations at the ion inertial scale and (2) the statistics of the numbers of reconnecting x-lines do not vary significantly between the various turbulent simulations. We find that the reconnection theory predicts quite well the scaling of the ratio of ion to electron heating, in which the statistics of the turbulent reconnection sites are expected to roughly cancel. Separate ion and electron heating rates scale differently from the theory, however. This suggests that the statistics of the turbulent reconnection (e.g., number of x-lines, percentage of x-lines reconnecting) is playing an important role in determining the ion and electron heating. Published by AIP Publishing.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Turbulent heating due to magnetic reconnection
- Creators
- M. A. Shay - University of DelawareC. C. Haggerty - University of DelawareW. H. Matthaeus - University of DelawareT. N. Parashar - University of DelawareM. Wan - Southern University of Science and TechnologyP. Wu - Queen's University BelfastLawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Physics of plasmas, Vol.25(1), 012304
- DOI
- 10.1063/1.4993423
- ISSN
- 1070-664X
- eISSN
- 1089-7674
- Publisher
- AIP Publishing
- Number of pages
- 9
- Grant note
- NNX08A083G; NNX14AC39G; NNX14AI63G; NNX15AW58G; NNX17AI25G / NASA; National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) AGS-1460130 / NSF; National Science Foundation (NSF) 11672123 / National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 01/01/2018
- Academic Unit
- Physics and Astronomy
- Record Identifier
- 9985224318702771
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