Simulation studies of the collisionless tearing instabilities

Abstract

Collisionless tearing instabilities and the consequent enhanced transport are investigated theoretically and also numerically, using a two-and-one-half-dimensional particle simulation code in a slab geometry. The effects of electrostatic fields on the instability are also considered. The initial current is found to diffuse along the perturbed magnetic field lines, the observed diffusion along the perturbed magnetic field lines, the observed diffusion coefficient being in good agreement with the theoretical prediction. The growth of the instability is observed to divide into three phases; a linearly unstable phase, a quasi-stable phase, and a nonlinear phase similar to the Rutherford phase. Electrostatic effects have a tendency to enhance the tearing mode growth rate. In multi-mode tearing, a coalescence of magnetic island is observed.

Open Boundary Condition for Particle Simulation in Magnetic Reconnection Research

“…In driven reconnection, plasma inflow and magnetic flux are supplied from upstream boundaries and drive reconnection, while in spontaneous reconnection, internal instabilities such as collisionless tearing instability [7][8][9][10][11][12][13] trigger reconnection without energy inflow from the boundaries.…”

The Role of the Guide Field in Relativistic Pair Plasma Reconnection

“…Reconnection with the uniform guide field has long been studied for better understanding of the reconnection structure (Drake & Lee 1977;Katanuma & Kamimura 1980;Hoshino 1987;Horiuchi & Sato 1997;Hesse et al 1999Hesse et al , 2004 and for applications to solar flares and to the Earth's magnetopause (Shibata et al 1995;Quest & Coroniti 1981;Sonnerup et al 1981). Recent three-dimensional (3D) PIC simulations (Scholer et al 2003;Drake et al 2003;Ricci et al 2003;Silin & Büchner 2003;Pritchett & Coroniti 2004) discussed reduction of the cross-field activities (Scholer et al 2003;Silin & Büchner 2003), detailed reconnection region structure (Pritchett & Coroniti 2004), and enhanced electron acceleration (Drake et al 2003;Ricci et al 2003).…”

A novel method to construct stationary solutions of the Vlasov–Maxwell system

“…This phenomenon, which also occurs in collisionless plasmas of the solar atmosphere and the terrestrial magnetotail, requires an anomalous resistivity, inertia-based processes or off-diagonal terms of the electron pressure tensor. Recently, a great deal of investigations of the collisionless magnetic reconnection have been performed by theoretical analyses [6,7,8,9,10], particle simulations [11,12,13,14], MHD simulations [15,16], and a Vlasov simulation [17].…”