Two Pathways of Turbulent Energy Processing in Solar Wind Current Sheets: Confined Fragmentation versus Organized Transport

Abstract Understanding how turbulent energy is dissipated in the heliosphere remains a central challenge in space plasma physics. While magnetic reconnection and other dissipative processes occurring within current sheets are widely regarded as leading channels for this dissipation, the fact that a solar wind reconnection exhaust is itself a current-sheet structure creates an inherent physical overlap, making it difficult to uniquely attribute observed energy conversion to either the global topology of the sheet or the active reconnection dynamics. In this paper, we provide observational evidence for two distinct pathways of turbulent energy processing in mesoscale solar wind current sheets. By preclassifying events according to the presence of reconnecting current sheets (RCSs) or the absence of nonreconnecting current sheets (NRCSs) of a reconnection jet and then applying a suite of scale-dependent and direction-resolved turbulence diagnostics, we identify two dynamical states. Lacking an efficient outflow, NRCSs tend to represent a state of “confined fragmentation,” characterized by stronger small-scale fluctuations, more intense intermittency signatures, and a larger ion temperature enhancement, consistent with localized, fragmentation-driven dissipation. In contrast, RCSs embody a state of “organized transport,” in which a coherent Alfvénic jet redistributes energy on large scales, yielding comparatively reduced small-scale intermittency, a more ordered internal magnetic structure, and a smaller ion temperature increase. This two-state paradigm offers a testable conceptual framework for how macroscopic transport channels modulate kinetic-scale turbulent dynamics, providing a new lens for interpreting energy dissipation in the solar wind and other collisionless plasmas.