A statistical relationship between magnetic reconnection, current sheets and
intermittent turbulence in the solar wind is reported for the first time using
in-situ measurements from the Wind spacecraft at 1 AU. We identify
intermittency as non-Gaussian fluctuations in increments of the magnetic field
vector, B, that are spatially and temporally non-uniform. The
reconnection events and current sheets are found to be concentrated in
intervals of intermittent turbulence, identified using the partial variance of
increments method: within the most non-Gaussian 1% of fluctuations in
B, we find 87%-92% of reconnection exhausts and ∼9% of current
sheets. Also, the likelihood that an identified current sheet will also
correspond to a reconnection exhaust increases dramatically as the least
intermittent fluctuations are removed from the dataset. Hence, the turbulent
solar wind contains a hierarchy of intermittent magnetic field structures that
are increasingly linked to current sheets, which in turn are progressively more
likely to correspond to sites of magnetic reconnection. These results could
have far reaching implications for laboratory and astrophysical plasmas where
turbulence and magnetic reconnection are ubiquitous.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Physical Review Letter