Study of 3D Electron-only Reconnection in a Low Electron Beta Plasma Environment

The plasma environment close to the solar corona is known to have a low electron beta, which means that the electron gyroscale and inertial scale are well differentiated. A new regime of kinetic-scale plasma turbulence, consisting of inertial kinetic Alfven modes, has been shown to exist in between these two scales [1]. In our previous 2.5D numerical study of this regime we showed that electron-only reconnection events, previously found by the MMS mission [2], were naturally produced in the turbulent environment [3]. We expand on this work by finding and characterizing electron-only reconnection events in 3D simulations of this turbulent regime. This research was supported by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) through its Center for Space and Earth Science (CSES). CSES is funded by LANLs Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program under project number 20210528CR. The work is also partly supported by NSF under Grants PHY-1707272 and PHY-2010098, by NASA under Grant NASA 80NSSC18K0646, and by the Wisconsin Plasma Physics Laboratory (US Department of Energy Grant DE-SC0018266). [1] - Roytershteyn, V., Boldyrev, S., Delzanno, G. L., Chen, C. H. K., Groselj, D., Loureiro, N. F., 2019, ApJ, 870, 103. [2] - Phan, T. D., Eastwood, J. P., Shay, M. A., et al. 2018, Nature, 557, 202. [3] - Vega, C., Roytershteyn , V., Delzanno, G. L., Boldyrev, S., 2020 ApJL 893 L10.