Related papers: Magnetic Reconnection in a Weakly Ionized Plasma
Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental process in a laboratory, magnetospheric, solar and astrophysical plasma, whereby magnetic energy is converted into heat, bulk kinetic energy and fast particle energy. Its nature in two dimensions is…
We present a statistical analysis of ion distributions in magnetic reconnection jets using data from the Magnetospheric Multiscale spacecraft. Compared with the quiet plasma in which the jet propagates, we often find anisotropic and…
Mini-magnetospheres are small ion-scale structures that are well-suited to studying kinetic-scale physics of collisionless space plasmas. Such ion-scale magnetospheres can be found on local regions of the Moon, associated with the lunar…
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…
Magnetic reconnection in the solar corona is thought to be unstable to the formation of multiple interacting plasmoids, and previous studies have shown that plasmoid dynamics can trigger MHD waves of different modes propagating outward from…
Magnetic reconnection occurs when two plasmas having co-planar but anti-parallel magnetic fields meet. At the contact point, the field is locally annihilated and the magnetic energy can be released into the surrounding plasma. Theory and…
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…
Non-collisional current sheets that form during the nonlinear development of magnetic reconnection are characterized by a small thickness, of the order of the electron skin depth. They can become unstable to the formation of plasmoids,…
Two cases of weakly and strongly stressed X-point collapse were considered. Here descriptors weakly and strongly refer to 20 % and 124 % unidirectional spatial compression of the X-point, respectively. In the weakly stressed case, the…
Reconnection physics at micro-scales is investigated in an electron magnetohydrodynamics frame. A new process of collapse of the neutral current sheet is demonstrated by means of analytical and numerical solutions. It shows how at scales…
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…
A 2D incompressible viscoresistive-MHD model [Mahapatra et. al., Phys. Plasmas 28, 072103 (2021)] is used to study the scaling of reconnection parameters in magnetic island coalescence problem under two interesting scenarios. Firstly, the…
The recent realization that Sweet-Parker current sheets are violently unstable to the secondary tearing (plasmoid) instability implies that such current sheets cannot occur in real systems. This suggests that, in order to understand the…
We derive basic scaling equations for relativistic magnetic reconnection in the general case of asymmetric inflow conditions and obtain predictions for the outflow Lorentz factor and the reconnection rate. Kinetic Particle-in-Cell…
Magnetic reconnection in strongly magnetized (low-beta), weakly collisional plasmas is investigated using a novel fluid-kinetic model [Zocco & Schekochihin, Phys. Plasmas 18, 102309 (2011)] which retains non-isothermal electron kinetics. It…
We present two-dimensional resistive magnetohydrodynamic simulations of line-tied asymmetric magnetic reconnection in the context of solar flare and coronal mass ejection current sheets. The reconnection process is made asymmetric along the…
We present a model for the spontaneous onset of fast magnetic reconnection in a weakly collisional plasma, such as the solar corona. When a current layer of macroscopic width undergoes collisional (Sweet-Parker) reconnection, a narrow…
Reconnection of the self-generated magnetic fields in laser-plasma interaction was first investigated experimentally by Nilson {\it et al.} [Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 255001 (2006)] by shining two laser pulses a distance apart on a solid target…
We perform a high-resolution two-dimensional fully-kinetic numerical simulation of a turbulent plasma system with observation-driven conditions, in order to investigate the interplay between turbulence, magnetic reconnection, and particle…
It has been proposed that particles bouncing between magnetized flows converging in a reconnection region can be accelerated by the first order Fermi mechanism. Analytical considerations of this mechanism have shown that the spectral index…