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The link between shocks, turbulence, and magnetic reconnection in collisionless plasmas

Sibeck, D.; Nykyri, K.; Daughton, W. +11 more

Global hybrid (electron fluid, kinetic ions) and fully kinetic simulations of the magnetosphere have been used to show surprising interconnection between shocks, turbulence, and magnetic reconnection. In particular, collisionless shocks with their reflected ions that can get upstream before retransmission can generate previously unforeseen phenome…

Computing the reconnection rate in turbulent kinetic layers by using electron mixing to identify topology

Daughton, W.; Nakamura, T. K. M.; Karimabadi, H. +2 more

Three-dimensional kinetic simulations of magnetic reconnection for parameter regimes relevant to the magnetopause current layer feature the development of turbulence, driven by the magnetic and velocity shear, and dominated by coherent structures including flux ropes, current sheets, and flow vortices. Here, we propose a new approach for computing…

Energy dissipation by whistler turbulence: Three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations

Chang, Ouliang; Wang, Joseph; Peter Gary, S.

Three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations of whistler turbulence are carried out on a collisionless, homogeneous, magnetized plasma model. The simulations use an initial ensemble of relatively long wavelength whistler modes and follow the temporal evolution of the fluctuations as they cascade into a broadband, anisotropic, turbulent spectrum …