Magnetic reconnection and stochastic plasmoid chains in high-Lundquist-number plasmas
By N. Loureiro, R. Samtaney, A. Schekochihin, Dmitri A. Uzdensky. 2011
183 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A numerical study of magnetic reconnection in the large-Lundquist-number ($S$), plasmoid-dominated regime is carried out for $S$ up to $10^7$. The theoretical model of Uzdensky {\it et al.} [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 105}, 235002 (2010)] is confirmed and partially amended. The normalized reconnection rate is $\normEeff\sim 0.02$ independently of $S$ for $S\gg10^4$. The plasmoid flux ($\Psi$) and half-width ($w_x$) distribution functions scale as $f(\Psi)\sim \Psi^{-2}$ and $f(w_x)\sim w_x^{-2}$. The joint distribution of $\Psi$ and $w_x$ shows that plasmoids populate a triangular region $w_x\gtrsim\Psi/B_0$, where $B_0$ is the reconnecting field. It is argued that this feature is due to plasmoid coalescence. Macroscopic "monster" plasmoids with $w_x\sim 10$% of the system size are shown to emerge in just a few Alfv\'en times, independently of $S$, suggesting that large disruptive events are an inevitable feature of large-$S$ reconnection.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ff4190531c3071ee12b2aaf0c8e9fdc042cbd30a
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Citations in the corpus
- Reconnection-driven plasmoids in blazars: fast flares on a slow envelope (2012, background): “Plasmoids grow fast through mergers and leavethe reconnection at a speed comparable to the Alfvén speed of the upstream plasma (Uzdensky et al. 2010; Loureiro et al. 2012a).”
- Plasmoids in relativistic reconnection, from birth to adulthood: first they grow, then they go (2016, background): “Fig.9 shows that accretion of particles in the current sheet can lead to the formation of “monster plasmoids” whose width reaches w/L ∼ 0.2, in agreement with the findings of MHD simulations of non-relativistic reconnection (Loureiro et al. 2012).”