Speaker
Description
Properties of turbulence in the interplanetary medium affect propagation of geomagnetic storm drivers such as CMEs. Magnetic reconnection in turbulent plasmas, specially at small scales, is relevant in the process of cross-scale energy transfer and energy dissipation in turbulence. Magnetic reconnection is a process in which magnetic energy dissipates, turning into kinetic and thermal energy, through the reconfiguration of the magnetic field topology. It has been observed throughout the solar wind at multiple spatial scales and Sun distances.
The study of magnetic reconnection in large- and medium-scale structures has received closer attention than ion-scale magnetic reconnection, due to instrumental limitations. Thanks to the high cadence Solar Orbiter data, and in particular the Proton-Alpha Sensor (PAS) from the Solar Wind Analyzer (SWA) instrument, we can now resolve ion velocity distribution functions inside current sheets of thicknesses in the range of few proton gyroradii. Thus, it is now possible to search for magnetic reconnection at scales near the ion spectral break of the turbulent cascade.
We introduce an algorithm that automatically identifies reconnecting current sheets near the ion spectral break in the solar wind, and assesses the presence of associated reconnection exhausts. The uncertainty associated to ion bulk velocity measurements constrains the Alfvén velocities that can be resolved with the available data, resulting in a lower threshold for the detectable reconnecting component of the magnetic field.
A catalog of small-scale current sheets in the solar wind is presented. We show the prevalence of reconnecting versus alfvenic current sheets near ion-scales, study their properties, and discuss the relevance of small-scale magnetic reconnection for energy dissipation in solar wind turbulence.
