Authors: Jeffersson Agudelo Rueda, (Department of Physics and Astronomy, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA), Yi-Hsin Liu (Department of Physics and Astronomy, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA), Kai Germaschewski (Space Science Center, University of New Hampshire, Durham NH 03824, USA)

In space plasmas, explosive and energetic events are routinely observed. Many of these events are associated with magnetic reconnection. Moreover, turbulence is undeniably present in a wide range of plasmas, e.g., solar wind, solar corona, accretion disks, etc. Magnetic reconnection and turbulence are important energy-transport and energy-transfer processes which not only transport energy across a broad range of scales but also facilitate the energy transfer between fields and particles. From in-situ observations in the Earth’s magnetosheath and numerical simulations, it is well known that turbulence can lead to reconnection events. Likewise, from observations in the Earth’s magnetotail, as well as simulations, turbulence might be present in almost any region of a reconnection event. Despite decades of research, there are still many open questions about turbulence and reconnection. By means of 2D PIC simulations, we explore the effect of driving turbulent fluctuations on a current sheet and study how these fluctuations can modify the onset of reconnection and its dynamics. Our results cast some doubt on the role of turbulent fluctuations as triggers of reconnection events in current sheets.