The role of guide field in magnetic reconnection driven by island coalescence
| dc.contributor.author | Stanier, A. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Daughton, W. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Simakov, Andrei N. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Chacón, L. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Le, A. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Karimabadi, H. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Ng, Jonathan | |
| dc.contributor.author | Bhattacharjee, A. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2021-07-27T14:52:52Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2021-07-27T14:52:52Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2017-02-24 | |
| dc.description.abstract | A number of studies have considered how the rate of magnetic reconnection scales in large and weakly collisional systems by the modelling of long reconnecting current sheets. However, this set-up neglects both the formation of the current sheet and the coupling between the diffusion region and a larger system that supplies the magnetic flux. Recent studies of magnetic island merging, which naturally include these features, have found that ion kinetic physics is crucial to describe the reconnection rate and global evolution of such systems. In this paper, the effect of a guide field on reconnection during island merging is considered. In contrast to the earlier current sheet studies, we identify a limited range of guide fields for which the reconnection rate, outflow velocity, and pile-up magnetic field increase in magnitude as the guide field increases. The Hall-MHD fluid model is found to reproduce kinetic reconnection rates only for a sufficiently strong guide field, for which ion inertia breaks the frozen-in condition and the outflow becomes Alfvénic in the kinetic system. The merging of large islands occurs on a longer timescale in the zero guide field limit, which may in part be due to a mirror-like instability that occurs upstream of the reconnection region. | en_US |
| dc.description.sponsorship | This work is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, Office of Applied Scientific Computing Research, and by the Collaborative Space Weather Modeling Program through NSF Grant No. AGS-1338944 and NASA Grant No. NNH13AW51I. The work used resources provided by the Los Alamos National Laboratory Institutional Computing Program, which is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration under Contract No. DE-AC52-06NA25396. | en_US |
| dc.description.uri | https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4976712 | en_US |
| dc.format.extent | 12 pages | en_US |
| dc.genre | journal articles | en_US |
| dc.identifier | doi:10.13016/m2w4dt-u98z | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Stanier, A. et al.; The role of guide field in magnetic reconnection driven by island coalescence; Physics of Plasmas 24, 022124, 24 February, 2017; https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4976712 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4976712 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/11603/22148 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | en_US |
| dc.publisher | AIP Publishing | en_US |
| dc.relation.isAvailableAt | The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) | |
| dc.relation.ispartof | UMBC Goddard Planetary Heliophysics Institute (GPHI) | |
| dc.rights | This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author. | |
| dc.rights | Public Domain Mark 1.0 | * |
| dc.rights | This work was written as part of one of the author's official duties as an Employee of the United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law. | |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/ | * |
| dc.title | The role of guide field in magnetic reconnection driven by island coalescence | en_US |
| dc.type | Text | en_US |