Observation of explosive collisionless reconnection in 3D nonlinear gyrofluid simulations

Abstract

The nonlinear dynamics of collisionless reconnecting modes is investigated, in the framework of a three-dimensional gyrofluid model. This is the relevant regime of high-temperature plasmas, where reconnection is made possible by electron inertia and has higher growth rates than resistive reconnection. The presence of a strong guide field is assumed, in a background slab model, with Dirichlet boundary conditions in the direction of nonuniformity. Values of ion sound gyro-radius and electron collisionless skin depth much smaller than the current layer width are considered. Strong acceleration of growth is found at the onset to nonlinearity, while at all times the energy functional is well conserved. Nonlinear growth rates more than one order of magnitude higher than linear growth rates are observed when entering into the small-${\Delta }^{\prime }$ regime.

References in corpus (2)

• Turbulent Magnetic Reconnection in Two Dimensions
• Nonlinear polarisation and dissipative correspondence between low frequency fluid and gyrofluid equations

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• "Ideal" tearing and the transition to fast reconnection in the weakly collisional MHD and EMHD regimes
• Secondary fast reconnecting instability in the sawtooth crash
• Explosive magnetic reconnection caused by an X-shaped current-vortex layer in a collisionless plasma
• Numerical comparison between a Gyrofluid and Gyrokinetic model investigating collisionless magnetic reconnection
• Gyrofluid analysis of electron ${\beta }_e$ effects on collisionless reconnection