Physics
Scientific paper
Dec 2001
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001agufmsm11b0813d&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2001, abstract #SM11B-0813
Physics
7827 Kinetic And Mhd Theory, 7835 Magnetic Reconnection, 7843 Numerical Simulation Studies
Scientific paper
Recent developments in two-dimensional, collisionless magnetic reconnection theory suggest that Hall electric fields have three important effects on the merging rate: 1) Reconnection occurs on a whistler time scale which is much shorter than the Alfvén, 2) The reconnection rate is insensitive to the flux-thawing mechanism, 3) The reconnection rate is insensitive to the ``system size.'' In this work, we compute numerical solutions of the resistive Hall MHD equations corresponding to pairwise magnetic island coalescence, starting from the equilibrium. Identifying the ``system size'' with the island wavelength λ , we observe the following. For ``small'' systems, with λ ≈ 10 di (where di is the ion inertial length), the electron and ion bulk flows decouple on a global scale (the island wavelength scale), and the coalescence proceeds on a whistler time scale. For ``large'' systems, with λ >> di, the coalescence proceeds in two distinct phases: 1) a ``flux pile-up'' phase, where magnetic energy builds up outside thin current sheets between the islands; 2) a ``whistler-mediated'' phase, where electron and ion bulk flows decouple within the thin current sheets, and no further flux pile-up occurs. For the range of Lundquist numbers considered in this study, we find that the reconnection rate in the whistler-mediated regime is not significantly larger than that in the flux pile-up regime.
Birn Joachim
Dorelli John C.
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