Related papers: Fast magnetic reconnection in laser-produced plasm…
A conceptual model of resistive magnetic reconnection via a stochastic plasmoid chain is proposed. The global reconnection rate is shown to be independent of the Lundquist number. The distribution of fluxes in the plasmoids is shown to be…
The discovery of rapid synchrotron gamma-ray flares above 100 MeV from the Crab Nebula has attracted new interest in alternative particle acceleration mechanisms in pulsar wind nebulae. Diffuse shock-acceleration fails to explain the flares…
Energy dissipation in collisionless plasmas is one of the most outstanding open questions in plasma physics. Magnetic reconnection and turbulence are two phenomena that can produce the conditions for energy dissipation. These two phenomena…
The rate of magnetic reconnection is of the utmost importance in a variety of processes because it controls, for example, the rate energy is released in solar flares, the speed of the Dungey convection cycle in Earth's magnetosphere, and…
Particle acceleration by magnetic reconnection is now recognized as an important process in magnetically dominated regions of galactic and extragalactic black hole sources. This process helps to solve current puzzles specially related to…
The relationship between magnetic reconnection and plasma turbulence is investigated using multipoint in-situ measurements from the Cluster spacecraft within a high-speed reconnection jet in the terrestrial magnetotail. We show explicitly…
A supersonic flow of magnetized plasma is produced by the application of a 1 MA-peak, 500 ns current pulse to a cylindrical arrangement of parallel wires, known as an inverse wire array. The plasma flow is produced by the JxB acceleration…
A new regime of fast magnetic reconnection with an out-of-plane (guide) magnetic field is reported in which the key role is played by an electron pressure anisotropy described by the Chew-Goldberger-Low gyrotropic equations of state in the…
We present preliminary results of particle-in-cell simulations of collisionless magnetic reconnection for conditions that apply to magnetically dominated pair plasma jets such as those in gamma-ray bursts. We find similar behaviour to…
Using a recently developed analytical procedure, we determine the rate of magnetic reconnection in the "standard" model of eruptive solar flares. During the late phase, the neutral line is located near the lower tip of the reconnection…
Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental plasma process that is thought to play a key role in the production of nonthermal particles associated with explosive phenomena in space physics and astrophysics. Experiments at high-energy-density…
The theoretical prediction that magnetic reconnection spontaneously drives turbulence has been supported by magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) and kinetic simulations. While reconnection with externally driven turbulence is accepted as an effective…
We present results from pulsed-power-driven magnetic reconnection experiments, in which we drove two exploding wire arrays in parallel to produce colliding plasma flows with anti-parallel magnetic fields of 1.2$\pm$0.2 T. The experimental…
Cosmic sources of gamma-ray radiation in the GeV range are often characterized by violent variability, in particular this concerns blazars, gamma-ray bursts, and the pulsar wind nebula Crab. Such gamma-ray emission requires a very efficient…
Magnetic reconnection is an energy conversion process important in many astrophysical contexts including the Earth's magnetosphere, where the process can be investigated in-situ. Here we present the first encounter of a reconnection site by…
Recent analytical works on strong magnetized plasma turbulence have hypothesized the existence of a range of scales where the tearing instability may govern the energy cascade. In this paper, we estimate the conditions under which such…
Plasmoid instability is usually accounted for the onset of fast reconnection events observed in astrophysical plasmas. However, the measured reconnection rate from observations can be one order of magnitude higher than that derived from MHD…
Magnetic reconnection is a process of magnetic field topology change, which is one of the most fundamental processes in magnetized plasmas. In most astrophysical environments the Reynolds numbers are large and therefore the transition to…
Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental process of magnetic field topology change. We analyze the connection of this process with turbulence which is ubiquitous in astrophysical environments. We show how Lazarian & Vishniac (1999) model of…
Fast particles are accelerated in astrophysical environments by a variety of processes. Acceleration in reconnection sites has attracted the attention of researchers recently. In this letter we analyze the energy distribution evolution of…