Fast collisionless reconnection and electron heating in strongly magnetized plasmas
arXiv:1301.0338 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.025002
Abstract
Magnetic reconnection in strongly magnetized (low-beta), weakly collisional plasmas is investigated using a novel fluid-kinetic model [Zocco & Schekochihin, Phys. Plasmas 18, 102309 (2011)] which retains non-isothermal electron kinetics. It is shown that electron heating via Landau damping (linear phase mixing) is the dominant dissipation mechanism. In time, electron heating occurs after the peak of the reconnection rate; in space, it is concentrated along the separatrices of the magnetic island. For sufficiently large systems, the peak reconnection rate is , where is the Alfvén speed based on the reconnecting field . The island saturation width is the same as in MHD models except for small systems, when it becomes comparable to the kinetic scales.
6 pages, 5 figures, submitted for publication
References in corpus (4)
- Magnetic reconnection and stochastic plasmoid chains in high-Lundquist-number plasmas
- Physical Origin of the Quadrupole Out-of-Plane Magnetic Field in Hall-MHD Reconnection
- Hamiltonian formulation and analysis of a collisionless fluid reconnection model
- An iterative semi-implicit scheme with robust damping
Cited by in corpus (45)
- Evidence for Electron Landau Damping in Space Plasma Turbulence
- Magnetic reconnection in the era of exascale computing and multiscale experiments
- Magnetic reconnection as a driver for a sub-ion scale cascade in plasma turbulence
- Electron and proton heating in trans-relativistic magnetic reconnection
- Phase mixing vs. nonlinear advection in drift-kinetic plasma turbulence
- Disruption of Alfvénic turbulence by magnetic reconnection in a collisionless plasma
- A Dynamical Model of Plasma Turbulence in the Solar Wind
- Fully kinetic versus reduced-kinetic modelling of collisionless plasma turbulence
- The Structure of Plasma Heating in Gyrokinetic Alfvénic Turbulence
- A Prospectus on Kinetic Heliophysics
- Laboratory Space Physics: Investigating the Physics of Space Plasmas in the Laboratory
- Laguerre-Hermite Pseudo-Spectral Velocity Formulation of Gyrokinetics
- Ion and electron heating during magnetic reconnection in weakly collisional plasmas
- Fourier-Hermite spectral representation for the Vlasov-Poisson system in the weakly collisional limit
- Constraints on ion vs. electron heating by plasma turbulence at low beta
- Viriato: a Fourier-Hermite spectral code for strongly magnetised fluid-kinetic plasma dynamics
- Kinetic microtearing modes and reconnecting modes in strongly magnetised slab plasmas
- Collisionless Reconnection in the Large Guide Field Regime: Gyrokinetic Versus Particle-in-Cell Simulations
- Gyro-induced acceleration of magnetic reconnection
- Fluctuation-dissipation relations for a plasma-kinetic Langevin equation
- A Legendre-Fourier spectral method with exact conservation laws for the Vlasov-Poisson system
- Interplay between intermittency and dissipation in collisionless plasma turbulence
- A Drift-Kinetic Analytical Model for SOL Plasma Dynamics at Arbitrary Collisionality
- Magnetic island merger as a mechanism for inverse magnetic energy transfer
- Electron-scale reduced fluid models with gyroviscous effects
- Decomposition of Plasma Kinetic Entropy into Position and Velocity Space and the Use of Kinetic Entropy in Particle-in-Cell Simulations
- Nonlinear Reconnection in Magnetized Turbulence
- Turbulence in Magnetized Pair Plasmas
- Two-Stage Bulk Electron Heating in the Diffusion Region of Anti-Parallel Symmetric Reconnection
- Magnetic Field Rotations in the Solar Wind at Kinetic Scales
- Kinetic Entropy-Based Measures of Distribution Function Non-Maxwellianity: Theory and Simulations
- Local Gyrokinetic Collisional Theory of the Ion-Temperature Gradient Mode
- Convergence of spectral discretizations of the Vlasov-Poisson system
- Gyrokinetic turbulence: between idealized estimates and a detailed analysis of nonlinear energy transfers
- Fluid vs. kinetic magnetic reconnection with strong guide-fields
- Resonant whistler-electron interactions: MMS observations vs. test-particle simulation
- Energy transport during 3D small-scale reconnection driven by anisotropic plasma turbulence
- Linear Collisionless Landau Damping in Hilbert Space
- A Parallel-Kinetic-Perpendicular-Moment Model for Magnetized Plasmas
- Machine-learning Closure for Vlasov-Poisson Dynamics in Fourier-Hermite Space
- Investigation of the collisionless plasmoid instability based on gyrofluid and gyrokinetic integrated approach
- Gyrokinetic simulations of fusion plasmas using a spectral velocity space representation
- Electron and Ion Heating during Magnetic Reconnection in Weakly Collisional Plasmas
- Characterizing Velocity-Space Signatures of Electron Energization in Large-Guide-Field Collisionless Magnetic Reconnection
- Random forcing with a constant power input for two-dimensional gyrokinetic simulations