Authors: Zubair I. Shaikh (UTD, TX), Ivan Y. Vasko (UTD, TX), Tai Phan (SSL, UC Berkeley), Stanislav Boldyrev (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA)

Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejections (ICMEs) are massive eruptions of plasma and magnetic fields from the Sun’s corona that travel through space, influencing planetary magnetospheres and space weather. ICMEs provides extremely low-beta conditions that are not typically found in the solar wind, with plasma beta values for protons and electrons ranging from 0.001 to 100, reflecting a wide range of pressure and magnetic field conditions. This wide variation in plasma beta makes ICMEs an ideal environment for examining kinetic-scale current sheets (CSs), as the range of beta provides unique insights into how these structures behave under different plasma conditions. Within these giant structures lie kinetic-scale current sheets (CSs)—thin, sheet-like regions where magnetic fields and current densities change abruptly over distances comparable to the sizes of ion and electron gyroradii or inertial lengths. Despite their small size, these CSs play a crucial role in energy conversion, particle acceleration, and turbulence within space plasmas. To identify and characterize these structures, we applied PVI (Partial Variance of Increments) analysis, a robust method for detecting sharp gradients in the magnetic field. This allows for precise mapping of kinetic-scale features, providing deeper insights into the microphysics of ICMEs and advancing our understanding of space plasma turbulence and energy dissipation. Using 11 Hz magnetic field data from the Wind spacecraft, we identified 4,600 current sheets across ten distinct ICMEs at 1 au. The thickness of these sheets spans from 0.1 to 10 times the ion inertial length, clearly marking them as kinetic-scale structures. Interestingly, in 90% of the cases, electrons are much hotter than protons, suggesting enhanced electron energization within these regions. Our analysis reveals that CS thickness and shear angles are sensitive to plasma beta, becoming thinner in low-beta conditions and expanding at higher beta. However, when scaled with the disruption scale, the CS thickness remains independent of plasma beta, pointing to a universal turbulence dissipation mechanism. Our statistical analysis is advancing the understanding of ICME microphysics in space plasma physics.