Giulia Murtas
West Virginia University
Magnetic Reconnection-Driven Compression Acceleration of Protons and Heavy Ions at the Heliospheric Current Sheet
During near-Sun crossings of the heliospheric current sheet (HCS), Parker Solar Probe observed populations of high-energy protons and heavier ions indicating possible energization by magnetic reconnection up to 10s – 100s keV per nucleon. In this talk, I will discuss ion compression acceleration at the HCS as a result of magnetic reconnection. To estimate the ion energization for this study, the Parker transport equation is solved on top of a large-scale 2D MHD reconnection simulation. The results show that multi-species ions develop power-law distributions with both spectral index and high-energy cutoff consistent with in-situ data. Additionally, the computed charge-to-mass ratio scales as Emax ∝ (Q/M )α with α ∼ 0.8 − 1.1, in line with PSP measurements in the broader range α ∼ 0.6 − 1.7. These findings further prove the role of magnetic reconnection in producing high-energy heavy ions at the HCS.