Related papers: Fast Reconnection in High-Lundquist-Number Plasmas…
This paper studies the growth rate of reconnection instabilities in thin current sheets in the presence of both resistivity and viscosity. In a previous paper, Pucci and Velli (2014), it was argued that at sufficiently high Lundquist number…
Magnetic reconnection is thought to be the dynamical mechanism underlying many explosive phenomena observed both in space and in the laboratory, though the question of how fast magnetic reconnection is triggered in such high Lundquist ($S$)…
A detailed numerical study of magnetic reconnection in resistive MHD for very large, previously inaccessible, Lundquist numbers ($10^4\le S\le 10^8$) is reported. Large-aspect-ratio Sweet-Parker current sheets are shown to be unstable to…
Magnetic reconnection in laboratory, space and astrophysical plasmas is often invoked to explain explosive energy release and particle acceleration. However, the timescales involved in classical models within the macroscopic MHD regime are…
Our understanding of magnetic reconnection in resistive magnetohydrodynamics has gone through a fundamental change in recent years. The conventional wisdom is that magnetic reconnection mediated by resistivity is slow in laminar high…
Magnetic reconnection mediated by the hyper-resistive plasmoid instability is studied with both linear analysis and nonlinear simulations. The linear growth rate is found to scale as $S_{H}^{1/6}$ with respect to the hyper-resistive…
It has been established that the Sweet-Parker current layer in high Lundquist number reconnection is unstable to the super-Alfv\'enic plasmoid instability. Past two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations have demonstrated that the…
We discuss the role of tearing instabilities in magnetic reconnection. In three dimensions this instability leads to the formation of strong Alfvenic waves that remove plasma efficiently from the reconnection layer. As a result the…
The manner in which the rate of magnetic reconnection scales with the Lundquist number in realistic three-dimensional (3D) geometries is still an unsolved problem. It has been demonstrated that in 2D rapid non-linear tearing allows the…
Magnetic reconnection is believed to be the driver of many explosive phenomena in Astrophysics, from solar to gamma-ray flares in magnetars and in the Crab nebula. However, reconnection rates from classic MHD models are far too slow to…
We investigate the development of tearing-mode instability using the highest-resolution two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations of reconnecting current sheets performed on a uniform grid, for Lundquist numbers of $10^3 \le S \le 5…
Fast reconnection operating in magnetically dominated plasmas is often invoked in models for magnetar giant flares, for magnetic dissipation in pulsar winds, or to explain the gamma-ray flares observed in the Crab nebula, hence its…
We study the linear and nonlinear evolution of the tearing instability on thin current sheets by means of two-dimensional numerical simulations, within the framework of compressible, resistive magnetohydrodynamics. In particular we analyze…
We study, by means of MHD simulations, the onset and evolution of fast reconnection via the "ideal" tearing mode within a collapsing current sheet at high Lundquist numbers ($S\gg10^4$). We first confirm that as the collapse proceeds, fast…
We study two dimensional turbulent magnetic reconnection in a compressible fluid in the gas pressure dominated limit. We use open boundary conditions and start from a Harris current sheet configuration with a uniform total pressure. A small…
Current sheets formed in magnetic reconnection events are found to be unstable to high-wavenumber perturbations. The instability is very fast: its maximum growth rate scales as S^{1/4} v_A/L, where L is the length of the sheet, v_A the…
This paper discusses the transition to fast growth of the tearing instability in thin current sheets in the collisionless limit where electron inertia drives the reconnection process. It has been previously suggested that in resistive MHD…
In this work we consider magnetic reconnection in thin current sheets with both resistive and electron inertia effects. When the current sheet is produced by a primary instability of the internal kink type, the analysis of secondary…
Magnetic reconnection provides the primary source for explosive energy release, plasma heating and particle acceleration in many astrophysical environments. The last years witnessed a revival of interest in the MHD tearing instability as a…
We use extensive 3D resistive MHD simulations to study how large-scale current sheets will undergo fast reconnection in the high Lundquist number $S$ limit (above $\sim 10^4$), when the system is subject to different externally driven…