Energy transfer and conversion in magnetic reconnection: Observation and simulation
Date
2025-11-19
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Physics of Plasmas
Abstract
One of the central problems in collisionless plasma turbulence is to understand the nature of the cross-scale energy transfer and dissipation occurring at kinetic scales. Magnetic reconnection plays an important role in dissipating energy and driving energy transfer in these systems. However, for reconnection, a detailed picture of the fluxes of energy in its several forms, and the conversion among them, until now remains unclear. In this study, a scale filtering method is adopted to explore how energy is converted between different forms and transferred across scales in turbulent magnetic reconnection using a combination of Magnetospheric Multiscale observations and particle-in-cell simulations. Two novel findings of this paper are that both ion and electron dissipation start to occur at sub-ion scale, at nearly same scale, and that most of the energy cascade due to reconnection is carried by the electron fluid.
Description
This article was originally published in Physics of Plasmas. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0278907
© 2025 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords
Energy conversion, Magnetospheric dynamics, Magnetic reconnection, Plasma heating, Plasma turbulence, Space plasma physics
Citation
S. Roy, R. Bandyopadhyay, S. Adhikari, Y. Yang, W. H. Matthaeus; Energy transfer and conversion in magnetic reconnection: Observation and simulation. Phys. Plasmas 1 November 2025; 32 (11): 112302. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0278907