  Plasma turbulence can be viewed as a magnetic landscape populated by large
and small scale coherent structures. In this complex network, large helical
magnetic tubes might be separated by small scale magnetic reconnection events
(current sheets). However, the identification of these magnetic structures in a
continuous stream of data has always been a challenging task. Here we present a
method that is able to characterize both the large and small scale structures
of the turbulent solar wind, based on the combined use of a filtered magnetic
helicity ($H_m$) and the Partial Variance of Increments (PVI). This simple,
single-spacecraft technique, has been validated first via direct numerical
simulations of plasma turbulence and then applied to data from the Parker Solar
Probe (PSP) mission. This novel analysis, combining $H_m$&PVI methods, reveals
that a large number of flux tubes populate the solar wind and continuously
merge in contact regions where magnetic reconnection and particle acceleration
may occur.
