Phase Diagram for Magnetic Reconnection in Heliophysical, Astrophysical and Laboratory Plasmas
By H. Ji, William S. Daughton. 2011
213 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Recent progress in understanding the physics of magnetic reconnection is conveniently summarized in terms of a phase diagram which organizes the essential dynamics for a wide variety of applications in heliophysics, laboratory and astrophysics. The two key dimensionless parameters are the Lundquist number and the macrosopic system size in units of the ion sound gyroradius. In addition to the conventional single X-line collisional and collisionless phases, multiple X-line reconnection phases arise due to the presence of the plasmoid instability either in collisional and collisionless current sheets. In particular, there exists a unique phase termed "multiple X-line hybrid phase" where a hierarchy of collisional islands or plasmoids is terminated by a collisionless current sheet, resulting in a rapid coupling between the macroscopic and kinetic scales and a mixture of collisional and collisionless dynamics. The new phases involving multiple X-lines and collisionless physics may be important for the emerging applications of magnetic reconnection to accelerate charged particles beyond their thermal speeds. A large number of heliophysical and astrophysical plasmas are surveyed and grouped in the phase diagram: Earth's magnetosphere, solar plasmas (chromosphere, corona, wind and tachocline), galactic plasmas (molecular clouds, interstellar media, accretion disks and their coronae, Crab nebula, Sgr A*, gamma ray bursts, magnetars), extragalactic plasmas (Active Galactic Nuclei disks and their coronae, galaxy clusters, radio lobes, and extragalactic jets). Significance of laboratory experiments, including a next generation reconnection experiment, is also discussed.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fbd1590815b629df1a2936d58d20eb943d1a41b0
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- PARTICLE ACCELERATION AND PLASMA DYNAMICS DURING MAGNETIC RECONNECTION IN THE MAGNETICALLY DOMINATED REGIME (2015, background): “This process may also be important when a hierarchy of collisional plasmoids (Loureiro et al. 2007; Bhattacharjee et al. 2009; Uzdensky et al. 2010) develops kinetic scale current layers that may trigger collisionless reconnection (Daughton et al. 2009; Ji & Daughton 2011).”
- Slow Solar Wind: Observations and Modeling (2016, unknown): “Figure 21 summarizes the different regimes in a diagram of the Lundquist number SL = μ0LVA/η versus the thickness of the reconnecting layer normalized to the ion inertial length δi = L/di (Ji and Daughton 2011; Baalrud et al. 2011).”
- The Interplay of Magnetically Dominated Turbulence and Magnetic Reconnection in Producing Nonthermal Particles (2019, background): “However, numerical simulations have found ξc/λX ∼ 50 in the collisionless regime (e.g. Daughton et al. 2006; Daughton & Karimabadi 2007; Ji & Daughton 2011).”