Scaling laws of resistive magnetohydrodynamic reconnection in the high-Lundquist-number, plasmoid-unstable regime

By Yi-Min Huang, Amitava Bhattacharjee. 2010

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The Sweet–Parker layer in a system that exceeds a critical value of the Lundquist number (S) is unstable to the plasmoid instability. In this paper, a numerical scaling study has been done with an island coalescing system driven by a low level of random noise. In the early stage, a primary Sweet–Parker layer forms between the two coalescing islands. The primary Sweet–Parker layer breaks into multiple plasmoids and even thinner current sheets through multiple levels of cascading if the Lundquist number is greater than a critical value Sc≃4×104. As a result of the plasmoid instability, the system realizes a fast nonlinear reconnection rate that is nearly independent of S, and is only weakly dependent on the level of noise. The number of plasmoids in the linear regime is found to scales as S3/8, as predicted by an earlier asymptotic analysis [N. F. Loureiro et al., Phys. Plasmas 14, 100703 (2007)]. In the nonlinear regime, the number of plasmoids follows a steeper scaling, and is proportional to S. The thick...

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4b6c0a06aafb5780982727323dc0d8c3892ef9df

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Citations in the corpus

The Interplay of Magnetically Dominated Turbulence and Magnetic Reconnection in Producing Nonthermal Particles (2019, background): “…the fractal-like process of current sheet disruption due to the plasmoid instability terminates when the length of the innermost local current layer of the chain is shorter than the critical length ξc (Huang & Bhattacharjee 2010; Uzdensky et al. 2010; Comisso et al. 2015; Comisso & Grasso 2016).”
Slow Solar Wind: Observations and Modeling (2016, unknown): “The reconnection process becomes fast and insensitive to resistivity but also unsteady and characterized by secondary plasmoids (Lapenta 2008; Cassak et al. 2009; Samtaney et al. 2009; Huang and Bhattacharjee 2010).”
A Reconnection Switch to Trigger gamma-Ray Burst Jet Dissipation (2010, background): “…that, for otherwise fixed parameters, non-relativistic Petschek may only be 10 times faster than non-relativistic collisional reconnection (Loureiro et al. 2007; Cassak et al. 2009; Kowal et al. 2009a; Loureiro et al. 2009; Samtaney et al. 2009; Huang & Bhattacharjee 2010; Uzdensky et al. 2010).”