  The physical foundations of the dissipation of energy and the associated
heating in weakly collisional plasmas are poorly understood. Here, we compare
and contrast several measures that have been used to characterize energy
dissipation and kinetic-scale conversion in plasmas by means of a suite of
kinetic numerical simulations describing both magnetic reconnection and
decaying plasma turbulence. We adopt three different numerical codes that can
also include interparticle collisions: the fully kinetic particle-in-cell VPIC,
the fully kinetic continuum Gkeyll, and the Eulerian Hybrid Vlasov-Maxwell
(HVM) code. We differentiate between (i) four energy-based parameters, whose
definition is related to energy transfer in a fluid description of a plasma,
and (ii) four distribution function-based parameters, requiring knowledge of
the particle velocity distribution function. There is an overall agreement
between the dissipation measures obtained in the PIC and continuum reconnection
simulations, with slight differences due to the presence/absence of secondary
islands in the two simulations. There are also many qualitative similarities
between the signatures in the reconnection simulations and the self-consistent
current sheets that form in turbulence, although the latter exhibits
significant variations compared to the reconnection results. All the parameters
confirm that dissipation occurs close to regions of intense magnetic stresses,
thus exhibiting local correlation. The distribution function-based measures
show a broader width compared to energy-based proxies, suggesting that energy
transfer is co-localized at coherent structures, but can affect the particle
distribution function in wider regions. The effect of interparticle collisions
on these parameters is finally discussed.
