Three-dimensional magnetic reconnection in particle-in-cell simulations of anisotropic plasma turbulence (Simulation Data)

This folder contains the output of the following simulation: 

We use the explicit Plasma Simulation Code (PSC, Germaschewski et al.2016) to simulate eight anisotropic counter-propagating Alfvén waves in an ion-electron plasma. The anisotropy of the initial fluctuation is set up according to the theory of critical balance by Sridhar & Goldreich (1994) and Goldreich & Sridhar (1995) at the small scale end of the inertial range: \(k_{\parallel} d_{i} = C (|k_{\perp}|d_{i})^{2/3}\), where \(C= 10^{-4/3}\). The normalization parameters are the speed of light \(c = 1\), the vacuum permittivity \(\epsilon_{0} = 1\), the magnetic permeability \(\mu_{0} = 1\), the Boltzmann constant \(k_{b}=1\), the elementary charge \(q=1\), the ion mass \(m_{i}=1\), the density of ions and electrons \(n_{i}=n_{e}=1\) and the ion inertial length \(d_{i}=c/\omega_{pi}\) where \(\omega_{pi}=\sqrt{n_{i}q^{2}/m_{i}\epsilon_{0}}\) is the ion plasma frequency. We set \(\beta_{s,\parallel}=1\) and \(T_{s,\parallel}/T_{s,\perp}=1\), where \(\beta_{s,\parallel}=2 n_s \mu_{0} k_{B}T_{s,\parallel}/B_{0}^{2}\) is the ratio between the plasma pressure parallel to the background magnetic field \(\mathbf{B}_{0}\) and the magnetic pressure and $T_{s,\parallel}$ is the parallel temperature. The magnetic field is normalised to \(B_{0}=V_{A}/c\),  where \(V_{A}=B_{0} / \sqrt{\mu_{0}n_{i}m_{i}}\) is the ion Alfvén speed. We use 100 particles per cell (100 ions and 100 electrons), a mass ratio of \(m_{i}/m_{e} = 100\) so that \(d_e = 0.1 d_{i}\) where \(m_{e}\) is the electron mass and \(d_{e}\) is the electron inertial length. The simulation box size is \(L_{x} \times L_{y} \times L_{z} = 24d_{i}\times24d_{i}\times125d_{i}\) and the spatial resolution is \(\Delta x =\Delta y = \Delta z =  0.06d_{i}\). We use a time step \(\Delta t =0.06/ \omega_{pi}\). In our normalisation, the Debye length \(\lambda_{D}=d_{i}\sqrt{\beta_{i}/2}V_{A}/c\) defines the minimum spatial distance that needs to be resolve in the simulation and \(\lambda_D=0.07d_i\).

This output corresponds to \(t=120 \omega_{pi}\). 

These data were produced using the Data Intensive at Leicester (DIaL) facility provided by the DiRAC project
dp126 "Identifying and Quantifying the Role of Magnetic Reconnection in Space Plasma Turbulence".