title: Identification of intermittent multifractal turbulence in fully kinetic simulations of magnetic reconnection.
abstract: Recent fully nonlinear, kinetic three-dimensional simulations of magnetic reconnection [W. Daughton et al., Nat. Phys. 7, 539 (2011)] evolve structures and exhibit dynamics on multiple scales, in a manner reminiscent of turbulence. These simulations of reconnection are among the first to be performed at sufficient spatiotemporal resolution to allow formal quantitative analysis of statistical scaling, which we present here. We find that the magnetic field fluctuations generated by reconnection are anisotropic, have nontrivial spatial correlation, and exhibit the hallmarks of finite range fluid turbulence: they have non-Gaussian distributions, exhibit extended self-similarity in their scaling, and are spatially multifractal. Furthermore, we find that the rate at which the fields do work on the particles, J · E, is also multifractal, so that magnetic energy is converted to plasma kinetic energy in a manner that is spatially intermittent. This suggests that dissipation in this sense in collisionless reconnection on kinetic scales has an analogue in fluidlike turbulent phenomenology, in that it proceeds via multifractal structures generated by an intermittent cascade.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Leonardis
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: S C
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Chapman
authors.affiliation: Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA.
authors.forename: W
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Daughton
authors.affiliation: University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA.
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Roytershteyn
authors.affiliation: University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA.
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Karimabadi