Related papers: Can plasmoid-mediated reconnection occur in collis…
In a magnetized, collisionless plasma, the magnetic moment of the constituent particles is an adiabatic invariant. An increase in the magnetic-field strength in such a plasma thus leads to an increase in the thermal pressure perpendicular…
Plasmoid-mediated reconnection plays a fundamental role in different solar atmospheric phenomena. Numerical reproduction of this process is therefore essential for developing robust solar models. Our goal is to assess plasmoid-mediated…
Modeling collisionless magnetic reconnection rate is an outstanding challenge in basic plasma physics research. While the seemingly universal rate of an order $\mathcal{O}(0.1)$ is often reported in the low-$\beta$ regime, it is not clear…
The plasmoid-induced-reconnection model explaining solar flares based on bursty reconnection produced by an ejecting plasmoid suggests a possible relation between the ejection velocity of a plasmoid and the rate of magnetic reconnection. In…
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 is a fundamental mechanism of driving eruptive phenomena of different scales and may be coupled with turbulence as suggested by recent remote-sensing and in-situ observations. However, the specific physics behind the…
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…
Magnetic reconnection in relativistic collisionless plasmas can accelerate particles and power high-energy emission in various astrophysical systems. Whereas most previous studies focused on relativistic reconnection in pair plasmas, less…
Astrophysical reconnection takes place in a turbulent medium. The turbulence in most cases is pre-existing, not caused by the reconnection itself. The model of magnetic reconnection in Lazarian & Vishniac (1999) predicts that in the…
We discuss how the model of magnetic reconnection in the presence of turbulence proposed inLazarian & Vishniac 1999 makes the reconnection rate independent either of resistivity or microscopic plasma effects, but determined entirely by the…
Using particle-in-cell simulations that label ions and electrons according to their initial inflow region, we find that during 2D collisionless magnetic reconnection, the bulk flow of the plasma from each inflow side crosses paths with…
Magnetohydrodynamic turbulence regulates the transfer of energy from large to small scales in many astrophysical systems, including the solar atmosphere. We perform three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations with unprecedentedly…
A set of reduced Hall magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations are used to evaluate the stability of large aspect ratio current sheets to the formation of plasmoids (secondary islands). Reconnection is driven by resistivity in this analysis,…
We present results from the first self-consistent multi-fluid simulations of chromospheric magnetic reconnection in a weakly ionized reacting plasma. We simulate two dimensional magnetic reconnection in a Harris current sheet with a…
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…
In solar flares and other astrophysical systems, a major challenge for solving particle acceleration problem associated with magnetic reconnection is the enormous scale separation between kinetic scales and observed reconnection scale.…
While relativistic magnetic reconnection in pair plasmas has emerged in recent years as a candidate for the origin of radiation from extreme astrophysical environments, the corresponding subrelativistic pair plasma regime has remained less…
Fast reconnection in magnetically dominated plasmas is widely invoked in models of dissipation in pulsar winds, gamma-ray flares in the Crab nebula, and to explain the radio nanoshots of pulsars. When current sheets evolve reaching a…
Recent experiments have demonstrated magnetic reconnection between colliding plasma plumes, where the reconnecting magnetic fields were self-generated in the plasma by the Biermann battery effect. Using fully kinetic 3-D simulations, we…
We discuss the model of magnetic field reconnection in the presence of turbulence introduced by us approximately ten years ago. The model does not require any plasma effects to be involved in order to make the reconnection fast. In fact, it…