English

Seeds for collisionless reconnection

Space Physics 2019-10-23 v2 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics Plasma Physics

Abstract

A stationary, two-dimensional, and non-driven antiparallel magnetic field configuration consisting of a central current film, flanked by two non-magnetic domains of electron inertial scale, resembling the Josephson model. Landau-Ginsburg conditions apply at the boundaries to the oppositely directed external magnetic fields, whose sources are located at infinity. On the microscopic level sufficiently large magnetic islands and X points form from exchange of small numbers of elementary magnetic fluxes without reference to any plasma instabilities which on these scales are purely electrostatic. These may serve as seeds to ignite large-scale collisionless reconnection.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.09524,
  title  = {Seeds for collisionless reconnection},
  author = {R. A. Treumann and Wolfgang Baumjohann},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.09524},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

12 pages, 2 figures, submitted to Ann. Geophys

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:56:35.559Z