The Scaling of Forced Collisionless Reconnection

Details The Scaling of Forced Collisionless Reconnection The Scaling of Forced Collisionless Reconnection

May 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005agusmsm33a..05s&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2005, abstract #SM33A-05

Physics

7835 Magnetic Reconnection

Scientific paper

We present two-fluid simulations of forced magnetic reconnection in a collisionless two-dimensional slab geometry. In the absence of forcing, our system has Δ' ≤ 0 and as expected exhibits no reconnection. The most common method of driving reconnection in such stable systems is to add a finite amplitude perturbation to the boundaries of the simulation. In contrast, reconnection in our study is driven by a spatially localized forcing function, which is added to the ion momentum equation in the interior of the simulation domain. This function represents a generic external forcing agent that drives plasma and magnetic field toward the reconnection region at a controllable rate. We investigate the behavior of the resulting reconnection as a function of various free parameters in the system, including the temporal and spatial structure of the forcing function, the plasma β, and the presence of an out-of-plane guide magnetic field component. Consistent with previous scaling studies done on systems with relatively large Δ', we find that for sufficiently strong forcing the reconnection process becomes Alfvénic, i.e., the inflow velocity scales roughly like some small fraction of the Alfvén speed based on the reconnecting component of the magnetic field just upstream of the dissipation region. The magnitude of this field and thus the rate of reconnection is ultimately controlled by the behavior of the forcing function.

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