Recent Developments in Collisionless Reconnection Theory: Implications for Laboratory and Space Plasmas

Details Recent Developments in Collisionless Reconnection Theory: Implications for Laboratory and Space Plasmas Recent Developments in Collisionless Reconnection Theory: Implications for Laboratory and Space Plasmas

Oct 2000

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000aps..dppvi1001b&link_type=abstract

American Physical Society, 42nd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics combined with the 10th International Congre

Physics

Plasma Physics

Scientific paper

Recent developments in the theory and simulation of collisionless reconnection hold the promise for providing solutions to some outstanding problems in laboratory and space plasma physics. Examples of such problems are sawtooth oscillations in tokamaks, reconnection in the Earth's magnetopause, magnetotail substorms, solar flares, and the dynamo effect in the sun and galaxies. In each of these problems, a key issue is the identification of fast reconnection rates that are insensitive to the mechanism that breaks field lines (e.g., resistivity). The classical models of Sweet-Parker and Petschek sought to solve this problem within the realm of resistive MHD. However, the plasmas mentioned above are very weakly collisional, and hence obey a generalized Ohm's law in which the Hall current and electron pressure gradient terms play a crucial role. We will review recent theoretical models and simulations on two classes of problems that appear to show a remarkable degree of consensus in their results: (i) steady-state reconnection and (ii) impulsive or triggered reconnection. In the triggered reconnection problem, not only is the growth rate fast, but the time-derivative of the growth rate changes rapidly. Analytical and simulation results from Hall MHD as well as particle-in-cell and hybrid models will be presented. Quantitative comparisons will be made with observational data from TFTR/JET tokamaks, and AMPTE/CCE, GEOTAIL, POLAR and YOHKOH satellites. Open questions will be identified.

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