SMuK 2023 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

P: Fachverband Plasmaphysik

P 3: Astrophysical Plasmas

P 3.1: Talk

Monday, March 20, 2023, 16:30–16:45, CHE/0089

Energy conversion by magnetic reconnection in multiple ion temperature plasmas — •Jeremy Dargent¹, Sergio Toledo-Redondo², Andrey Divin³, and Maria Elena Innocenti¹ — ¹Institut für Theoretische Physik, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany — ²Department of Electromagnetism and Electronics, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain — ³St. Petersburg, Russia

Magnetic reconnection is one of the most efficient plasma process to convert magnetic energy into kinetic energy. In this work, we study the impact of the microscopic distribution function on the energy budget of symmetric magnetic reconnection in collisionless plasmas. We run two two-dimensional semi-implicit PIC simulations of symmetric reconnection with the same global parameters, but with different ion distribution functions: one simulation is loaded using Maxwellian distributions, while the other is the sum of two Maxwellian distributions, a hot one and a cold one, resulting in a very peaked distribution with large tails. We measure the evolution of the bulk and thermal kinetic energies in both simulations for each population and compare it to the loss of magnetic energy through a contour surrounding the ion diffusion region. We show that the global energy budget for ions and electrons does not change depending on the distribution function of the plasma, but also that, when focusing on sub-populations, the hot ion population gains more energy than the cold ion population and that the distribution of the energy gain between kinetic and thermal energy also depends on the initial temperature.