Speaker
Description
Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental plasma process that explosively releases energy and accelerates particles to high energies. Common in space plasmas, it also occurs in Earth’s magnetotail, the nightside of Earth's magnetosphere, where it drives particle acceleration, influences plasma dynamics in the near-Earth space environment, and plays a crucial role in space weather.
We present fully kinetic simulations of magnetic reconnection in Earth's magnetotail, including both ions and electrons, to investigate the small-scale physics of this process. To study this energy conversion process, we use the particle-in-cell (PIC) code ECsim, which conserves energy to machine precision, and employ simulations using parameters from a well-studied magnetic reconnection event observed by the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission.
Our study explores how variations in initial plasma conditions and numerical parameters affect particle energization during reconnection. We also compare the resulting particle energy distributions with MMS observations to evaluate how accurately the simulations reproduce key features of the event and to identify their limitations.
