Related papers: Resistive instabilities of current sheets in strat…
Sweet-Parker current sheets in high Lundquist number plasmas are unstable to tearing, suggesting they will not form in physical systems. Understanding magnetic reconnection thus requires study of the stability of a current sheet as it…
Dynamic mitigation is presented for filamentation instability and magnetic reconnection in a plasm driven by a wobbling electron sheet current. The wobbling current introduces an oscillating perturbation and smooths the perturbation. The…
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…
The tearing mode instability is one important mechanism that may explain the triggering of fast magnetic reconnection in astrophysical plasmas such as the solar corona and the Earth's magnetosphere. In this paper, the linear stability…
Magnetic reconnection is believed to be the driver of many explosive phenomena in Astrophysics, from solar to gamma-ray flares in magnetars and in the Crab nebula. However, reconnection rates from classic MHD models are far too slow to…
We study the time-dependent formation and evolution of a current sheet (CS) in a magnetized, collisionless, high-beta plasma using hybrid-kinetic particle-in-cell simulations. An initially tearing-stable Harris sheet is frozen into a…
Linear stability of a current sheet that is subject to an impulsive acceleration due to a shock passage is studied with the effect of guide magnetic field. We find that the current sheet embedded in relativistically magnetized plasma always…
In flare-relevant current sheets, tearing instability may trigger explosive reconnection and plasmoid formation. We explore how the thermal and tearing modes reinforce each other in the fragmentation of a current sheet in the solar corona…
In the presence of strong density stratification, hydromagnetic turbulence attains qualitatively new properties: the formation of magnetic flux concentrations. We review here the theoretical foundations of this mechanism in terms of what is…
We study the linear and nonlinear evolution of the tearing instability on thin current sheets by means of two-dimensional numerical simulations, within the framework of compressible, resistive magnetohydrodynamics. In particular we analyze…
Magnetic reconnection is thought to be the dynamical mechanism underlying many explosive phenomena observed both in space and in the laboratory, though the question of how fast magnetic reconnection is triggered in such high Lundquist ($S$)…
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…
Electron current layers, which form in various natural and laboratory plasmas, are susceptible to multiple instabilities, with tearing being a prominent instability driven by current gradients. Tearing is considered a potential mechanism…
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…
Tearing instability, also known as plasmoid instability, is an effective mechanism to speed up magnetic reconnection process, working in a wide range of magnetized plasma systems with different spatial scales, ionization degrees, and…
We investigate the role of kinetic instabilities driven by a proton anisotropy on the onset of magnetic reconnection by means of 2-D hybrid simulations. The collisionless tearing of a current sheet is studied in the presence of a proton…
Magnetic reconnection, a fundamental plasma process, is pivotal in understanding energy conversion and particle acceleration in astrophysical systems. While extensively studied in two-dimensional (2D) configurations, the dynamics of…
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,…
We investigate the development of tearing-mode instability using the highest-resolution two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations of reconnecting current sheets performed on a uniform grid, for Lundquist numbers of $10^3 \le S \le 5…
This paper studies the growth rate of reconnection instabilities in thin current sheets in the presence of both resistivity and viscosity. In a previous paper, Pucci and Velli (2014), it was argued that at sufficiently high Lundquist number…