  How energy is converted into thermal energy in weakly collisional and
collisionless plasma processes such as magnetic reconnection and plasma
turbulence has recently been the subject of intense scrutiny. The
pressure-strain interaction has emerged as an important piece, as it describes
the rate of conversion between bulk flow and thermal energy density. In two
companion studies, we presented an alternate decomposition of the
pressure-strain interaction to isolate the effects of converging/diverging flow
and flow shear instead of compressible and incompressible flow, and we derived
the pressure-strain interaction in magnetic field-aligned coordinates. Here, we
use these results to study pressure-strain interaction during two-dimensional
anti-parallel magnetic reconnection. We perform particle-in-cell simulations
and plot the decompositions in both Cartesian and magnetic field-aligned
coordinates. We identify the mechanisms contributing to positive and negative
pressure-strain interaction during reconnection. This study provides a roadmap
for interpreting numerical and observational data of the pressure-strain
interaction, which should be important for studies of reconnection, turbulence,
and collisionless shocks.
