Investigation of magnetic reconnection through NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission reveals details about nature of reconnection in Earth’s magnetosheath
MELVILLE, N.Y., Oct. 1, 2024 — Physics of Plasmas has chosen Northumbria University’s Dr. Julia Stawarz as the recipient of the 2024 Ronald C. Davidson Award for Plasma Physics for her paper, “Turbulence-driven magnetic reconnection and the magnetic correlation length: Observations from Magnetospheric Multiscale in Earth’s magnetosheath,” published in the January 2022 issue.
The annual award of $5,000 is presented in collaboration with the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics to recognize outstanding plasma physics research by a Physics of Plasmas author.
Dr. Stawarz is a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Mathematics, Physics and Electrical Engineering at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom. She is also the first female associate editor of Physics of Plasmas.
“It is a huge honor to receive this award and to see my name listed alongside all of the amazing plasma physicists that have won it in the past — not to mention Ron Davidson, for whom the award is named,” said Dr. Stawarz. “It is always a really nice feeling to see the work that you have been working on and have found so fascinating receiving attention from the wider field.”
Her paper investigates magnetic reconnection, a plasma process long thought to play an important role in the dynamics of turbulent plasmas. In magnetic reconnection, magnetic energy gets suddenly released and transferred to the plasma — accelerating flows, energizing particles, and exciting waves or fluctuations. It’s a process that has proven difficult to study, in part because of the complex magnetic configurations involved and in part because of the incredibly small nature of the structures affected.
According to Dr. Stawarz, she and her team approached this issue by utilizing “exceptionally high-resolution measurements” from NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission to identify and examine turbulence-generated magnetic reconnection in Earth’s magnetosheath, a region of space where a unique type of reconnection known as “electron-only” — meaning only electrons are impacted by the reconnection event — has been suggested to occur.
“We were able to demonstrate with the measurements that both electron-only reconnection and the more standard ‘ion-coupled’ reconnection occur in this region, and that the relative prevalence of these different types of reconnection depends on the length scale over which the turbulence is stirred up,” said Dr. Stawarz.
Currently living in the United Kingdom but originally from the United States, Dr. Stawarz received her PhD in physics from the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she held a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Following her graduation in 2016, she took the opportunity to do her postdoctoral work at Imperial College London before moving to Northumbria University in 2022.
Dr. Stawarz said she was fortunate to get involved in the field early, researching solar wind turbulence with Prof. Charles W. Smith after her first year of undergraduate work at the University of New Hampshire. This work, in turn, fueled her interest in space plasma physics and the study of plasma turbulence.
She noted that just as she was wrapping up her PhD, NASA launched its Magnetospheric Multiscale mission — providing the research world with enormously useful measurements of the fundamental kinetic processes occurring in the collisionless plasma we find in space. This sparked her involvement with the mission’s science team, which she credits as having had “a huge impact” in shaping her career.
“I work in the field of space plasma physics, which focuses on studying the plasmas that are found in near-Earth space — from the Sun out to the edge of our solar system — where we can send spacecraft to directly measure the plasma,” said Dr. Stawarz. “Spacecraft measurements of the plasmas in our solar system provide us with detailed measurements of fundamental plasma physics that are relevant to plasma environments throughout the universe. My work mainly involves analyzing these measurements from spacecraft such as NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale and Parker Solar Probe and ESA’s Solar Orbiter, although I have also done work with numerical simulations at various points in my career.”
With regard to what’s next, Dr. Stawarz said the coming years look to be an exciting time for the study of plasma turbulence in space. NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale has provided an “absolutely amazing” dataset that will continue to pay revolutionary dividends for our understanding of plasma turbulence at the smallest scales. Meanwhile, a new generation of space missions, including NASA’s HelioSwarm (scheduled for 2029) and ESA’s proposed Plasma Observatory (which Dr. Stawarz is involved with through the project’s Science Study Team), should give us an even greater glimpse into these processes in the coming years.
The 2024 Ronald C. Davidson Award Selection Committee consisted of Physics of Plasmas Editorial Advisory Board Members Ricky Lay Kee Ang (Singapore University of Technology and Design), Alessandro Bortolon (Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory), Amy Keesee (University of New Hampshire), and Jiayong Zhong (Beijing Normal University). Representing the APS-DPP was Debra Callahan (Focused Energy and last year’s winner). The committee reviewed the top-cited and top-viewed papers and nominated several authors from across the topical focus areas of Physics of Plasmas. The final selection was made by vote of the full Editorial Advisory Board.
The 2024 Ronald C. Davidson Award for Plasma Physics will be presented to Dr. Stawarz during the 66th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics in Atlanta, Georgia.
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ABOUT THE RONALD C. DAVIDSON AWARD FOR PLASMA PHYSICS
The award is provided by AIP Publishing in honor of Ronald Davidson’s exceptional contributions as Editor-in-Chief of Physics of Plasmas for 25 years. The annual award of $5,000 is presented in collaboration with the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics and recognizes outstanding plasma physics research by a Physics of Plasmas author.
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