Current Sheet Formation and Reconnection Dynamics in the Solar Corona

Statistics – Computation

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

Current sheet formation is a necessary consequence of the evolution of the multi-polar magnetic field topologies that are ubiquitous throughout the solar corona. We present a very high-resolution study of 3D MHD current sheet formation and the resulting reconnection dynamics in an environment appropriate for the corona. The initial field consists of a translationally invariant, potential field with a null-point topology (i.e., 4-flux systems) and a low-beta plasma. A finite-extent, 3D Syrovatskii-type current sheet forms as a result of stressing of this system by a uniform, incompressible flow applied at the line-tied photospheric boundary. The system is assumed to be ideal, except for the presence of numerical resistivity. The fully 3-D evolution is calculated with very high resolution (9x and 10x refinement across the full extent of the current sheet) using the Adaptively Refined MHD Solver (ARMS). The initial evolution of this computationally-intensive simulation results in a current sheet with a nearly 30-to-1 aspect ratio, a significant fraction of the system characteristic length, that unexpectedly appears to be stable. In addition, up to this point in the evolution any magnetic reconnection that we observe is of the slow Sweet-Parker type. We expect, however, that as we continue stressing the field, the current sheet will become unstable and develop explosive dynamics. We discuss the implications of our results on coronal structure and activity, such as heating and eruptions.
This work has been supported, in part, by the NASA HTP and SR&T programs.

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