Electron-only reconnection in kinetic Alfvén turbulence

We study numerically small-scale reconnection events in kinetic, low-frequency, quasi-2D turbulence (termed kinetic-Alfvén turbulence). Using 2D particle-in-cell simulations, we demonstrate that such turbulence generates reconnection structures where the electron dynamics do not couple to the ions, similarly to the electron-only reconnection events recently detected in the Earth's magnetosheath by Phan et al. (2018). Electron-only reconnection is thus an inherent property of kinetic-Alfvén turbulence, where the electron current sheets have limited anisotropy and, as a result, their sizes are smaller than the ion inertial scale. The reconnection rate of such electron-only events is found to be close to $0.1$.

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