A New Look at Driven Magnetic Reconnection at the Terrestrial Subsolar Magnetopause

Details A New Look at Driven Magnetic Reconnection at the Terrestrial Subsolar Magnetopause A New Look at Driven Magnetic Reconnection at the Terrestrial Subsolar Magnetopause

Dec 2003

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003agufmsm52b0590d&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2003, abstract #SM52B-0590

Physics

7827 Kinetic And Mhd Theory, 7835 Magnetic Reconnection, 7839 Nonlinear Phenomena, 7843 Numerical Simulation Studies, 7859 Transport Processes

Scientific paper

The physics of flux pileup magnetic reconnection at the terrestrial subsolar magnetopause is addressed. Analytical results for 3D reconnection are reviewed and compared with global magnetohydrodynamics simulations of subsolar magnetopause reconnection under steady, southward IMF conditions. The scaling of the magnetic flux pileup and the reconnection electric field with plasma resistivity are shown to be consistent with scalings predicted by the 3D stagnation point flow annihilation model of Sonnerup and Priest (J. Plasma Phys., 14, 283-294,1975) and Craig et al. (ApJ., 485, 383-388, 1997), implying that the reconnection rate should vanish in the infinite Lundquist number limit. Effects of Hall electric fields are addressed using an analytical 2D stagnation point annihilation model which allows flux pileup to saturate well before the reconnection rate begins to drop; nevertheless, our resistive Hall MHD results predict significant pileup at the subsolar magnetopause even for a purely southward IMF orientation. This result is puzzling, since spacecraft observations typically show no significant pileup of magnetic energy at the magnetopause when the IMF is southward. It thus appears that Hall-induced pileup saturation alone cannot account for the lack of observed magnetic energy pileup during subsolar magnetic reconnection under southward IMF conditions.

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