Related papers: Reconnection via the Tearing Instability
Magnetic reconnection is thought to be the driver for many explosive phenomena in the universe. The energy release and particle acceleration during reconnection have been proposed as a mechanism for producing high-energy emissions and…
The collision of magnetic reconnection jets is studied by means of a three dimensional numerical simulation at kinetic scale, in the presence of a strong guide field. We show that turbulence develops due to the jets collision producing…
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…
The understanding of magnetic reconnection in three-dimension (3D) is far shallower than its counterpart in two-dimension (2D) due to its potential complication, not to mention the evolving of the spontaneously growing turbulence. We…
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…
Magnetic reconnection plays an essential role in the generation and evolution of astrophysical magnetic fields. The best tested and most robust reconnection theory is that of Parker and Sweet. According to this theory, the reconnection rate…
This study focuses on energy conversion related to tearing-driven magnetic reconnection in the context of weakly collisional astrophysical plasmas. We present results from a two-dimensional hybrid particle-in-cell simulation employing novel…
Reconnection and turbulence are two of the most commonly observed dynamical processes in plasmas, but their relationship is still not fully understood. Using 2.5D kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of both strong turbulence and…
We consider stochastic reconnection in a magnetized, partially ionized medium. Stochastic reconnection is a generic effect, due to field line wandering, in which the speed of reconnection is determined by the ability of ejected plasma to…
During magnetic reconnection in collisionless space plasma, the electron fluid decouples from the magnetic field within narrow current layers, and theoretical models for this process can be distinguished in terms of their predicted current…
Electron-scale surface waves are shown to be unstable in the transverse plane of a shear flow in an initially unmagnetized plasma, unlike in the (magneto)hydrodynamics case. It is found that these unstable modes have a higher growth rate…
Current sheets formed in magnetic reconnection events are found to be unstable to high-wavenumber perturbations. The instability is very fast: its maximum growth rate scales as S^{1/4} v_A/L, where L is the length of the sheet, v_A the…
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 physical origin of 'anomalous' resistivity in magnetic reconnection remains one of the longest-standing problems in space plasma physics. While the empirical Bohm diffusion scaling ($\eta \propto T/B$) is widely invoked to explain fast…
It has recently been proposed (Loureiro & Boldyrev 2017; Mallet et al. 2017) that the inertial interval in magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence is terminated at small scales not by a Kolmogorov-like dissipation region, but rather by a new…
The problem of the linear microtearing mode in a slab magnetised plasma, and its connection to kinetic reconnecting modes, is addressed. Electrons are described using a novel hybrid fluid-kinetic model that captures electron heating, ions…
The linear instability and nonlinear dynamics of collisional (resistive) and collisionless (due to electron inertia) double tearing modes (DTMs) are compared with the use of a reduced cylindrical model of a tokamak plasma. We focus on cases…
In three-dimensional magnetic configurations for a plasma in which no closed field line or magnetic null exists, no magnetic reconnection can occur, by the strictest definition of reconnection. A finitely long pinch with line-tied boundary…
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…
Magnetic reconnection is a plasma phenomenon where a topological rearrangement of magnetic field lines with opposite polarity results in dissipation of magnetic energy into heat, kinetic energy and particle acceleration. Such a phenomenon…