Authors: Giulia Murtas (Center for KINETIC Plasma Physics, WVU), Xiaocan Li (LANL / New Mexico Consortium), Fan Guo (LANL), Giuseppe Arrò (UW-Madison), Jeongbhin Seo (LANL), Colby Haggerty (IfA / UH Manoa)

During near-Sun crossings of the heliospheric current sheet (HCS), Parker Solar Probe (PSP) observed populations of high-energy protons and heavier ions indicating possible energization by magnetic reconnection up to 10s – 100s keV/nucleon. Here I present a study of ion acceleration by magnetic reconnection at the HCS. To estimate ion energization, we solve the Parker transport equation coupled to a large-scale 2D MHD reconnection simulation. We find that multiple ion species develop power-law distributions with both spectral index and high-energy cutoff consistent with in-situ data. By accounting for the injection physics determined by kinetic simulations, we confirm that the charge-to-mass ratio scales as Emax ∝ (Q/M )^α with α ∼ 0.3 − 1.1, approximately consistent with PSP measurements in the broader range α ∼ 0.6 − 1.7. These findings further support the role of magnetic reconnection in producing high-energy heavy ions at the HCS.