Debye scale turbulence within the electron diffusion layer during magnetic reconnection

J. Jara-Almonte, W. Daughton, H. Ji

doi:10.1063/1.4867868

Debye scale turbulence within the electron diffusion layer during magnetic reconnection

DOI PDF 被引用文献1件

J. Jara-Almonte

Center for Magnetic Self-Organization, Max-Planck/Princeton Center for Plasma Physics, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory 1 , Princeton, New Jersey 08543, USA
W. Daughton

Los Alamos National Laboratory 2 , Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA
H. Ji

Center for Magnetic Self-Organization, Max-Planck/Princeton Center for Plasma Physics, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory 1 , Princeton, New Jersey 08543, USA

抄録

<jats:p>During collisionless, anti-parallel magnetic reconnection, the electron diffusion layer is the region of both fieldline breaking and plasma mixing. Due to the in-plane electrostatic fields associated with collisionless reconnection, the inflowing plasmas are accelerated towards the X-line and form counter-streaming beams within the unmagnetized diffusion layer. This configuration is inherently unstable to in-plane electrostatic streaming instabilities provided that there is sufficient scale separation between the Debye length λD and the electron skin depth c/ωpe. This scale separation has hitherto not been well resolved in kinetic simulations. Using both 2D fully kinetic simulations and a simple linear model, we demonstrate that these in-plane streaming instabilities generate Debye scale turbulence within the electron diffusion layer at electron temperatures relevant to magnetic reconnection both in the magnetosphere and in laboratory experiments.</jats:p>