  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 inter-particle 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
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 inter-particle collisions on these parameters is finally
discussed.
