The description of the local turbulent energy transfer, andthe high-resolution ion distributionsmeasured by the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, together provide a formidable tool to explorethe cross-scale connection between the fluid-scale energy cascade and plasma processes at sub-ionscales. When the small-scale energy transfer is dominated byAlfv ́enic, correlated velocity and
magnetic field fluctuations, beams of accelerated particlesare more likely observed. Here, for thefirst time we report observations suggesting the nonlinear wave-particle interaction as one possiblemechanism for the energy dissipation in space plasmas.