The description of the local turbulent energy transfer and the high-resolution ion distributions measured by the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission together provide a formidable tool to explore the cross-scale connection between the fluid-scale energy cascade and plasma processes at subion scales. When the small-scale energy transfer is dominated by Alfvénic, correlated velocity, and magnetic field fluctuations, beams of accelerated particles are more likely observed. Here, for the first time, we report observations suggesting the nonlinear wave-particle interaction as one possible mechanism for the energy dissipation in space plasmas.

The transport of energetic particles in the presence of magnetic turbulence is an important but unsolved problem of space physics and astrophysics. Here, we aim at advancing the understanding of energetic particle transport by means of a new numerical model of synthetic magnetic turbulence. The model builds up a turbulent magnetic field as a superposition of space-localized fluctuations at different spatial scales. The resulting spectrum is isotropic with an adjustable spectral index. The model allows us to reproduce a spectrum broader than four decades, and to regulate the level of intermittency through a technique based on the p-model. Adjusting the simulation parameters close to solar wind conditions at 1 au, we inject ∼1 MeV protons in the turbulence realization and compute the parallel and perpendicular diffusion coefficients as a function of spectral extension, turbulence level, and intermittency. While a number of previous results are recovered in the appropriate limits, including anomalous transport regimes for low turbulence levels, we find that long spectral extensions tend to reduce the diffusion coefficients. Furthermore, we find for the first time that intermittency has an influence on parallel transport but not on perpendicular transport, with the parallel diffusion coefficient increasing with the level of intermittency. We also obtain the distribution of particle inversion times for parallel velocity, a power law for more than one decade, and compare it with the pitch angle scattering times observed in the solar wind. This parametric study can be useful to interpret particle propagation properties in astrophysical systems.

The properties of the turbulence that develops in the outflows of magnetic reconnection have been investigated using self-consistent plasma simulations, in three dimensions. As commonly observed in space plasmas, magnetic reconnection is characterized by the presence of turbulence. Here we provide a direct comparison of our simulations with reported observations of reconnection events in the magnetotail, investigating the properties of the electromagnetic field and the energy conversion mechanisms. In particular, simulations show the development of a turbulent cascade consistent with spacecraft observations, statistics of the dissipation mechanisms in the turbulent outflows similar to the ones observed in reconnection jets in the magnetotail, and that the properties of turbulence vary as a function of the distance from the reconnecting X-line.

The interaction of two colliding Alfvén wave packets is described here by means of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) and hybrid kinetic numerical simulations. The MHD evolution revisits the theoretical insights described by Moffatt, Parker, Kraichnan, Chandrasekhar, and Elsässer in which the oppositely propagating large-amplitude wave packets interact for a finite time, initiating turbulence. However, the extension to include compressive and kinetic effects, while maintaining the gross characteristics of the simpler classic formulation, also reveals intriguing features that go beyond the pure MHD treatment.

The analysis of the Parker–Moffatt problem, recently revisited in Pezzi et al. (Astrophys. J., vol. 834, 2017, p. 166), is here extended by including Hall magnetohydrodynamics and two hybrid kinetic Vlasov–Maxwell numerical models. The presence of dispersive and kinetic features is studied in detail and a comparison between the two kinetic codes is also reported. Focus on the presence of non-Maxwellian signatures shows that – during the collision – regions characterized by strong temperature anisotropy are recovered and the proton distribution function displays a beam along the direction of the magnetic field, similar to some recent observations of the solar wind.