Speaker
Mr
Jeremy Dargent
(CNRS/LPP/IRAP)
Description
Tangential current layers are ubiquitous in the Universe.They appear in magnetized
collisionless plasmas as a result of the Frozen-in law and the conservation of field line
connectivity. However, there are few steady kinetic descriptions of them and most of
these describe symmetric layers. The BAS model (Belmont et al. 20132) is a semi-
analytical model which provides a steady ion distribution function for asymmetric
current sheet. We used this model to initialize fully kinetic Particle-in-Cell simulations
and showed its efficiency. We then apply this model to initialize asymmetric magnetic
reconnection simulations and study the influence of the initial structure of the current
layer on the phenomenon. This detailed description of the magnetic reconnection site
is essential to understand future results from the recently launched MMS mission.
Primary author
Mr
Jeremy Dargent
(CNRS/LPP/IRAP)
Co-authors
Dr
Benoît Lavraud
(CNRS/IRAP)
Dr
Gérard Belmont
(CNRS/LPP)
Dr
Michael Hesse
(NASA/GSFC)
Dr
Nicolas Aunai
(CNRS/LPP)
Dr
Nicolas Dorville
(CNRS/LPP)
