Numerical Study of Kinetic-Scale Plasma Turbulence with Low Electron Beta

In turbulent plasma systems where the electron beta is a lot smaller than one, the range of scales between the electron inertial and gyro-scales becomes accessible to plasma fluctuations. This plasma environment is expected to favor the creation of electron-scale current sheets, which may enable efficient particle energization. In this presentation we discuss the results of numerical simulations of kinetic-scale plasma turbulence with low electron beta run with spectral code SpectralPlasmaSolver (SPS). This code is proving to be promising in the study of this plasma regime, allowing the simulation of plasma environments where the magnetic fluctuations are small relative to the background field and the quasineutrality parameter is much larger than one. We discuss statistics of current sheets, which are found to play an important role in energy dissipation. A few current sheets are seen to exhibit signatures of electron-only magnetic reconnection and are analyzed in detail.