The inner structure of collisionless magnetic reconnection: The electron-frame dissipation measure and Hall fields
Abstract
It was recently proposed that the electron-frame dissipation measure, the energy transfer from the electromagnetic field to plasmas in the electron's rest frame, identifies the dissipation region of collisionless magnetic reconnection [Zenitani et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 195003 (2011)]. The measure is further applied to the electron-scale structures of antiparallel reconnection, by using two-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. The size of the central dissipation region is controlled by the electron-ion mass ratio, suggesting that electron physics is essential. A narrow electron jet extends along the outflow direction until it reaches an electron shock. The jet region appears to be anti-dissipative. At the shock, electron heating is relevant to a magnetic cavity signature. The results are summarized to a unified picture of the single dissipation region in a Hall magnetic geometry.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1110.3103,
title = {The inner structure of collisionless magnetic reconnection: The electron-frame dissipation measure and Hall fields},
author = {Seiji Zenitani and Michael Hesse and Alex Klimas and Carrie Black and Masha Kuznetsova},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1110.3103},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
10 pages, 9 figures; published in Physics of Plasmas; this version contains all the corrections in PoP 21, 129906 (2014)