Authors: Zhiyu Yin (University of Maryland), James Drake (University of Maryland), Marc Swisdak (University of Maryland), Harry Arnold (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory), Fan Guo (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Joel Dahlin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

A solar flare is a sudden and dramatic release of energy that occurs in the atmosphere of the Sun and is thought to be caused by a sudden release of energy that occurs during the process of magnetic reconnection. Magnetic reconnection is a process by which the magnetic field lines in a plasma become rearranged, releasing a large amount of energy in the process. According to previous Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations, the production of non-thermal particles during magnetic reconnection is controlled by Fermi acceleration in macroscale magnetic fields and does not depend on kinetic-scale boundary layers. The enormous separation of scale between PIC domains and solar macroscales likely leads to the failure of these simulations to produce power law spectra extending over multiple decades in energy. A new computational model, kglobal, based on this observation demonstrated the self-consistent production of power laws in electrons that extended more than two decades in energy. Here we report the development of “extended kglobal” which self-consistently includes non-thermal ions and electrons. The electron energy distribution includes a power law and is very similar to that in the original kglobal. The spectra of the energetic ions are more complex although non-thermal particles again extend over nearly three decades in energy. When the guide field is weak, the total energy of the nonthermal ions significantly exceeds that in the hot thermal population even though their number density is smaller. Our results can be used to explore the spectra of energetic ions produced during magnetic reconnection and compare them to observations. More details and characteristics of the energy distribution will be presented.