Statistical Properties of Turbulent Fluctuations Associated with Electron-only Magnetic Reconnection

Giuseppe Arrò

Turbulence in magnetized plasmas is a complex multi-scale process not yet fully understood. In addition to various high frequency modes, magnetic reconnection has been suggested to play a key role in the development of sub-ion scale turbulence. In this context, “electron-only reconnection”, a new reconnection mechanism driven only by the electrons, came recently into play and its role in turbulence is still debated. Using numerical simulations, we compare the properties of the turbulence associated with electron-only reconnection and of the turbulence associated with standard ion-coupled reconnection. The structure functions analysis shows that these two kinds of turbulent cascade share the same statistical properties and no differences related to the specific reconnection mechanism are found. This suggests that the statistics of turbulence depends only on the coupling between the magnetic field and the particles but not on the specific process responsible for their demagnetization.

Related paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.08155