Magnetic Reconnection by a Self-Retreating X-Line
Astrophysics
2008-12-18 v2
Abstract
Particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of collisionless magnetic reconnection are performed to study asymmetric reconnection in which an outflow is blocked by a hard wall while leaving sufficiently large room for the outflow of the opposite direction. This condition leads to a slow, roughly constant motion of the diffusion region away from the wall, the so-called `X-line retreat'. The typical retreat speed is ~0.1 times the Alfven speed. At the diffusion region, ion flow pattern shows strong asymmetry and the ion stagnation point and the X-line are not collocated. A surprise, however, is that the reconnection rate remains the same unaffected by the retreat motion.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0808.2179,
title = {Magnetic Reconnection by a Self-Retreating X-Line},
author = {M. Oka and M. Fujimoto and T. K. M. Nakamura and I. Shinohara and K. -I. Nishikawa},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0808.2179},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
4 pages; Phys. Rev. Lett., in press