Related papers: Thermodynamics of Shear Equilibration During Magne…
Solar flares may be the best-known examples of the explosive conversion of magnetic energy into bulk motion, plasma heating, and particle acceleration via magnetic reconnection. The energy source for all flares is the highly sheared…
Magnetic reconnection, a fundamentally important process in many aspects of astrophysics, is believed to be initiated by the tearing instability of an electric current sheet, a region where magnetic field abruptly changes direction and…
Using observations from the Solar Dynamics Observatory's Atmosphere Imaging Assembly and the Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager, we present novel measurements of the shear of post-reconnection flare loops (PRFLs) in…
We present the first results of three-dimensional (3D) numerical magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of the onset of magnetic reconnection via the tearing instability in dynamically thinning current sheets in the solar corona. In all our…
The spontaneous evolution of magnetic reconnection in generalized situations (with thermodynamic asymmetry regarding the current sheet and magnetic shear) is investigated using two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulation. We focus on 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…
The thickness of current sheets is extremely important, especially as it relates to the onset of fast magnetic reconnection. Onset determines how much magnetic free energy can build up in a field before it is explosively released. This has…
Particle acceleration in space and astrophysical reconnection sites is an important unsolved problem in studies of magnetic reconnection. Earlier kinetic simulations have identified several acceleration mechanisms that are associated with…
The efficiency of energy conversion during magnetic reconnection is related to the reconnection rate. While the stable reconnection rate has been studied extensively, its growth between the time of reconnection onset and the peak…
We investigate magnetic-energy dissipation, current-sheet dynamics, and nonthermal particle acceleration in three-dimensional relativistic reconnection in an electron--ion plasma with a realistic mass ratio. Using particle-in-cell…
In this article, we measure the mean magnetic shear from the morphological evolution of flare ribbons, and examine the evolution of flare thermal and non-thermal X-ray emissions during the progress of flare reconnection. We analyze three…
Many in-situ spacecraft observations have demonstrated that magnetic reconnection in the Earth's magnetotail is largely controlled by the pre-reconnection current sheet configuration. One of the most important thin current sheet…
Magnetic reconnection in an antiparallel uniform Harris current sheet equilibrium, which is initially perturbed by a region of enhanced resistivity limited in all three dimensions, is investigated through compressible magnetohydrodynamic…
We investigate the kinetic effects of upstream, magnetic field-aligned, flow shear on anti-parallel magnetic reconnection using 2.5D Particle-In-Cell simulations. Our results demonstrate that flow shear significantly alters the reconnection…
Magnetic reconnection plays a critical role in many astrophysical processes where high energy emission is observed, e.g. particle acceleration, relativistic accretion powered outflows, pulsar winds and probably in dissipation of Poynting…
The tearing mode instability is a key process for magnetic energy conversion in magnetohydrodynamics, once anti-parallel components are allowed to reconnect, leading to the formation of magnetic islands. It has been employed to explain…
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…
Magnetic reconnection occurring in collisionless environments is a multi-scale process involving both ion and electron kinetic processes. Because of their small mass, the electron scales are difficult to resolve in numerical and satellite…
The behaviour of magnetic perturbations of an initially potential three-dimensional equilibrium magnetic null point are investigated. The basic components which constitute a typical disturbance are taken to be rotations and shears, in line…
To systematically stress a rotationally symmetric 3D magnetic null point by advecting the opposite footpoints of the spine axis in opposite directions. This stress eventually concentrates in the vicinity of the null point forming a local…