SM51A-2561
Reduction of Ion Heating in Magnetic Reconnection by Large Scale Effective Potentials
Friday, 18 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Colby C Haggerty, University of Delaware, Physics and Astronomy, Newark, DE, United States, Michael A Shay, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, United States, James Frederick Drake, University of Maryland College Park, College Park, MD, United States and Tai Phan, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States
Abstract:
Ion heating due to magnetic reconnection is an important process with applications to diverse plasmas, but previous simulations and observations have measured heating less than half of theoretical predictions. Using kinetic particle-in-cell simulations, we show that this heating reduction is due to the presence of large scale parallel electric fields creating an effective field aligned potential which reduces the velocities of counter streaming ions created by Fermi reflection. This potential arises to contain hot exhaust electrons, and an analytic form suitable for observations is derived. The field aligned potential is shown to be critical for understanding both ion and electron heating and so the formation and characteristics of this potential are discussed as well.
