Kinetic simulations of collisionless magnetic reconnection

International audienceThis paper focuses on magnetic reconnection and its role in magnetospheric physics, where collisions are inexistant. In this context, the presence of a very cold ion population of ionospheric origin is known to have an important contribution to the particle density at the magnetopause. However, besides this mass loading effect, consequences of their extremely low temperature, and therefore of their must smaller gyroscale, have not yet been addressed from a modeling viewpoint. This study presents two fully kinetic simulations with and without cold ions in the magnetosphere and highlights how their small Larmor radius can change signatures expected to be proxy of the X line in spacecraft measurements. In a second part, this paper addresses shortly the problem of the X line orientation in an asymmetric system. Using this time hybrid kinetic simulations, we show the X line aligned with the bisector of upstream magnetic field vectors results in faster reconnection rate. This have consequences regarding where reconnection at the magnetopause, although models here do not include large scale dynamics. We conclude with perspectives regarding future developments to address multi-scale magnetic reconnection dynamics at the magnetopause