Related papers: System Size Dependence of Collisionless Reconnecti…
The rate of magnetic reconnection is of the utmost importance in a variety of processes because it controls, for example, the rate energy is released in solar flares, the speed of the Dungey convection cycle in Earth's magnetosphere, and…
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…
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 debate surrounding fast magnetic energy dissipation by magnetic reconnection has remained a fundamental topic in the plasma universe, not only in the Earth's magnetosphere but in astrophysical objects such as pulsar magnetospheres and…
Magnetic reconnection in naturally occurring and laboratory settings often begins locally and elongates, or spreads, in the direction perpendicular to the plane of reconnection. Previous work has largely focused on current sheets with a…
Numerical simulations of strongly compressible MHD corresponding to a stellar atmosphere with substantial gravity and near force-free magnetic fields show that the current sheet collapses (its width decreasing substantially). As a result,…
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 requires, at least locally, a non-ideal plasma response. In collisionless space and astrophysical plasmas, turbulence could permit this instead of the too rare binary collisions. We investigated the influence of…
Magnetic reconnection provides the primary source for explosive energy release, plasma heating and particle acceleration in many astrophysical environments. The last years witnessed a revival of interest in the MHD tearing instability as a…
Magnetic reconnection can explosively release magnetic energy when opposing magnetic fields merge and annihilate through a current sheet, driving plasma jets and accelerating non-thermal particle populations to high energy, in plasmas…
One of the main questions in magnetic reconnection is the origin of triggering behavior with on/off properties that accounts, once it is activated, for the fast magnetic energy conversion to kinetic and thermal energies at the heart of…
Astrophysical fluids are generically turbulent, which means that frozen-in magnetic fields are, at least, weakly stochastic. Therefore realistic studies of astrophysical magnetic reconnection should include the effects of stochastic…
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…
Relativistic magnetic reconnection is one of the most fundamental mechanisms considered responsible for the acceleration of relativistic particles in astrophysical jets and magnetospheres of compact objects. Understanding the properties of…
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…
Analytical theory of fast magnetic reconnection with a large guide field is presented for the first time. We confirm that two distinct reconnection regimes are possible depending on whether the diffusion region thickness $\delta$ is larger…
This paper presents two-fluid simulations of forced magnetic reconnection with finite electron inertia in a collisionless three-dimensional (3D) cube with periodic boundaries in all three directions. Comparisons are made to analogous…
We study two dimensional turbulent magnetic reconnection in a compressible fluid in the gas pressure dominated limit. We use open boundary conditions and start from a Harris current sheet configuration with a uniform total pressure. A small…
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…
Magnetic field-lines in astrophysical plasmas are expected to be frozen-in at scales larger than the ion gyroradius. The rapid reconnection of magnetic flux structures with dimensions vastly larger than the gyroradius requires a breakdown…