Driven Magnetic Reconnection in Semi-Collisional Regimes: Fully Kinetic Simulations with Boundary Conditions Relevant to MRX

Computer Science – Performance

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2723 Magnetic Reconnection (7526, 7835)

Scientific paper

Recent 2D collisionless kinetic simulations of driven magnetic reconnection with boundary conditions relevant to the Magnetic Reconnection eXperiment (MRX) have successfully reproduced overall dynamics and the global (i.e. the ion-scale) geometry of the reconnection region (Dorfman et al., to appear in Physics of Plasmas, 2008). At the same time, the structure of the electron diffusion layer was different between the experiment (Ji et al.,GRL, v. 35, L13106 , 2008) and the simulations. This discrepancy may indicate that the actual reconnection mechanism in the experiment differs from that in the 2D collisionless simulations. The two leading possibilities to explain this inconsistency are binary collisions and 3D effects such as current aligned instabilities. We present the initial results of a systematic analysis of the role of binary collisions on driven magnetic reconnection in MRX-relevant geometry. This study utilizes ultra-high performance 3D kinetic simulation code VPIC (K. J. Bowers et al. Phys. Plasmas, v. 15, p.~055703, 2008), which treats Coulomb collisions using a well-known Monte-Carlo technique (T. Takizuka and H. Abe, J. Comput. Phys., v. 25, p. 205, 1977). In 2D simulations, the inclusion of binary collisions is observed to modify the structure of the electron diffusion region compared to the collisionless case. In particular, for the levels of collisionality comparable to the experimental ones, the layer may become significantly broader at the location of maximum electron outflow (the position where its width is measured experimentally). The implications of these results for interpreting the experimental observations are discussed.

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