Energy conversion by magnetic reconnection in multiple ion temperature plasmas

This work investigates the energy transfer in the process of collisionless antiparallel magnetic reconnection and its dependance to the velocity distribution function of the inflowing plasma. We realised two two-dimensional semi-implicit PIC simulations of symmetric reconnection with exactly the same global parameters, but with different distributions of plasma: one simulation is loaded using Maxwellian distributions, while the other is the sum of two Maxwellian distributions, a hot one and a cold one, resulting in a very peaked distribution with large tails. We measure the increase of the bulk and thermal kinetic energies in both simulation for each population and compare it to the loss of magnetic energy through a contour surrounding the ion diffusion region. We show that the global energy budget for ions and electrons does not change depending on the distribution function of the plasma, but also that, when focusing on sub-populations, the hot ion population (i.e. the tail of the distribution) get more thermal energy than the cold ion population (i.e. the core of the distribution).