Plasma heating and acceleration in reconnecting systems

Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental plasma process that converts magnetic energy to plasma energy, accelerating and heating it.

This process plays an important role in shaping plasma environments throughout the Universe, and is the driver of large-scale magnetospheric dynamics directly impacting our ionosphere.

To understand how plasma environments form and are maintained, we must understand how the energy is converted and distributed among different plasma constituents as well as thermal and energetic populations.

Magnetic reconnection is a multi-scale, non-stationary process where different acceleration and thermalization mechanisms operate simultaneously or sequentially, with strong spatial profiles.

Therefore, numerical simulations is an invaluable tool that provide context and aid in the interpretation of observational data, reveal key mechanisms, and formulate theoretical hypotheses to be verified or disproven by observations.

This project combines state-of-the-art numerical simulations and in situ spacecraft observations to investigate the energy partition and flow in reconnecting systems operating at different boundary conditions encountered near Earth.

We both investigate key signature events and construct a statistical database of energy partition characteristics and associated plasma conditions.

Based on the observations, we design and execute tailored simulations to identify key processes that explains the observations under different conditions.