Particle Acceleration in Kinetic Simulations of Nonrelativistic Magnetic Reconnection with Different Ion–Electron Mass Ratios

Abstract

Abstract By means of fully kinetic particle-in-cell simulations, we study whether the proton-to-electron mass ratio m i /m e influences the energy spectrum and underlying acceleration mechanism during magnetic reconnection. While kinetic simulations are essential for studying particle acceleration during magnetic reconnection, a reduced m i /m e is often used to alleviate the demanding computing resources, which leads to artificial scale separation between electron and proton scales. Recent kinetic simulations with high mass ratios have suggested new regimes of reconnection, as electron pressure anisotropy develops in the exhaust region and supports extended current layers. In this work, we study whether different m i /m e changes the particle acceleration processes by performing a series of simulations with different mass ratio (m i /m e = 25–400) and guide field strength in a low-β plasma. We find that mass ratio does not strongly influence reconnection rate, magnetic energy conversion, ion internal energy gain, plasma energization processes, ion energy spectra, and the acceleration mechanisms for high-energy ions. Simulations with different mass ratios are different in electron acceleration processes, including electron internal energy gain, electron energy spectrum, and the acceleration efficiencies for high-energy electrons. We find that high-energy electron acceleration becomes less efficient when the mass ratio gets larger because the Fermi-like mechanism associated with particle curvature drift becomes less efficient. These results indicate that when particle curvature drift dominates high-energy particle acceleration, the further the particle kinetic scales are from the magnetic field curvature scales (∼d i ), the weaker the acceleration will be.