Related papers: Fast reconnection in relativistic plasmas: the mag…
The recent observations of Singh et al. (2012) have shown multiple plasma ejections and the intermittent nature of magnetic reconnection in the solar chromosphere, highlighting the need for fast reconnection to occur in highly collisional…
We develop a first-principles model for the relativistic magnetic reconnection rate in strongly magnetized pair plasmas. By considering the energy budget and required current density near the x-line, we analytically show that in the…
Magnetic reconnection can develop spontaneously via the tearing instability, often invoked to explain disruptive instabilities in fusion devices, solar flares, the generation of periodic density disturbances at the tip of helmet streamers,…
Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental and omnipresent energy conversion process in plasma physics. Novel observations of fields and particles from Parker Solar Probe (PSP) have shown the absence of reconnection in a large number of current…
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…
Turbulent plasma motion is common in the universe, and invoked in solar flares to drive effective acceleration leading to high energy electrons. Unresolved mass motions are frequently detected in flares from extreme ultraviolet (EUV)…
Fast Magnetic Reconnection is currently regarded as an important process also beyond the solar system, specially in magnetically dominated regions of galactic and extragalactic sources like the surrounds of black holes and relativistic…
Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental physical process converting magnetic energy into not only plasma energy but also particle energy in various astrophysical phenomena. In this letter, we show a unique dataset of a solar flare where…
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…
The unusually short durations, high luminosities, and high photon energies of the Crab Nebula gamma-ray flares require relativistic bulk motion of the emitting plasma. We explain the Crab flares as the result of randomly oriented…
We present a two-fluid magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) model of quasi-stationary, two-dimensional magnetic reconnection in an incompressible plasma composed of electrons and ions. We find two distinct regimes of slow and fast reconnection. The…
The role of the Weibel instability is investigated for the first time in the context of the large-scale magnetic reconnection problem. A late-time evolution of magnetic reconnection in relativistic pair plasmas is demonstrated by…
Astrophysical fluids are generally turbulent and this preexisting turbulence must be taken into account for the models of magnetic reconnection which are attepmted to be applied to astrophysical, solar or heliospheric environments. In…
We study magnetic reconnection events in a turbulent plasma within the two-fluid theory. By identifying the diffusive regions, we measure the reconnection rates as function of the conductivity and current sheet thickness. We have found that…
We perform three dimensional (3D) ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations to study the parametric decay instability of Alfven waves in turbulent plasmas and explore its possible applications in the solar wind. We find that, over a broad…
Magnetic reconnection, or the ability of the magnetic field lines that are frozen in plasma to change their topology, is a fundamental problem of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). We briefly examine the problem starting with the well-known…
We show how the conversion of magnetic field energy via magnetic reconnection can progress in a fully three-dimensional, fast, volume-filling regime. An initial configuration representative of many laboratory, space and astrophysical…
We investigate the large scale evolution of a relativistic magnetic reconnection in an electron-positron pair plasma by a relativistic two-fluid magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) code. We introduce an inter-species friction force as an effective…
We present a new model of magnetic reconnection in the presence of turbulence, applicable when the magnetic helicity is non-zero. The new model differs from the Lazarian-Vishniac turbulent reconnection theory by emphasizing the role of…
We report simulation results for turbulent magnetic reconnection obtained using a newly developed Reynolds-averaged magnetohydrodynamics model. We find that the initial Harris current sheet develops in three ways, depending on the strength…