Dr. Abhishek Rajhans

Magnetic reconnection is a key plasma process that transforms energy stored in magnetic fields into the kinetic energy of particles. It plays an important role in accelerating particles to high non-thermal energies. Understanding how energy is divided between thermal (associated with plasma heating) and non-thermal (linked to particle acceleration) components, as well as between different particle species, is crucial and remains unclear. In-situ data from Earth’s magnetosphere offer a valuable opportunity for exploring these processes, which are common in space plasmas. In this presentation, I will discuss the estimates of energy partitioning obtained from a statistical analysis of magnetic reconnection events in Earth's magnetotail, utilizing data from the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission. Results indicate that as the average energy per particle increases for both ions and electrons, their energy spectra become softer, leading to a decrease in the fraction of energy associated with non-thermal components. Moreover, although ions can be up to ten times more energetic than electrons, they exhibit smaller non-thermal energy fractions. I will explore the implications of these findings and discuss related ongoing work.