Wave modes facilitating fast magnetic reconnection

Physics – Plasma Physics

Scientific paper

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[4475] Nonlinear Geophysics / Scaling: Spatial And Temporal, [5737] Planetary Sciences: Fluid Planets / Magnetospheres, [7835] Space Plasma Physics / Magnetic Reconnection, [7863] Space Plasma Physics / Turbulence

Scientific paper

Whistler and kinetic Alfven waves are often invoked to explain fast magnetic reconnection in collsionless plasmas. But how these wave modes facilitate the reconnection has remained unclear. An important unanswered question deals with the meaning of the wave frequency in the context of magnetic reconnection. New measurement on a fast explosive reconnection event in the Versatile Toroidal Facility (VTF) at MIT provides an interesting example of the meaning of the wave mode and the associated frequency directly related to the time scale of the impulsive reconnection. We examine the measurements in VTF in view of the whistler wave mode, showing that the explosive growth in the reconnection is related to the thinning of the current sheet to a few electron skin depths. We further demonstrate that the fastest measured time scale (~ 3 microseconds) and the largest normalized reconnection rate (~0.35) agree with those predicted from the whistler mode dispersion relation.

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