Authors: Joshua Goodwill (University of Delaware), Subash Adhikari (University of Delaware), Xiaocan Li (Dartmouth College), Francesco Pucci (ISTP), Yan Yang (University of Delaware), Fan Guo (Los Alamos National Laboratory), William Mattheaus (University of Delaware)

Turbulence can be driven by large scale gradients, often in velocity shears or temperature gradients. In space and astrophysical plasmas in particular, conditions for velocity shear instabilities are a common occurrence, and these can be sources of turbulence generation, modifications to transport, and resulting turbulent heating. Previously, much of the attention to shear-driven plasma dynamics has concentrated on initiation of the process through linear (Kelvin Helmholtz) instability or its large scale effects when reaching saturation due to vortex roll-up. These have been most completely studied for collisional MHD plasmas where dissipation is controlled by viscosity and resistivity. For collisionless plasma, the corresponding small scale kinetic effects responsible for energy conversion and dissipation have been studied in fully developed turbulence and in magnetic reconnection systems; however this analysis has not yet been applied for velocity shear-driven turbulence. Here the goal is to examine collisionless energy dissipation related to an initial shear flow that transitions in the nonlinear regime.