Magnetic reconnection mediated by hyper-resistive plasmoid instability

Abstract

Magnetic reconnection mediated by the hyper-resistive plasmoid instability is studied with both linear analysis and nonlinear simulations. The linear growth rate is found to scale as $S_H^{1/6}$ with respect to the hyper-resistive Lundquist number $S_H\equiv L^3{V}_A/{\eta }_H$, where $L$ is the system size, $V_A$ is the Alfvén velocity, and ${\eta }_H$ is the hyper-resistivity. In the nonlinear regime, reconnection rate becomes nearly independent of $S_H$, the number of plasmoids scales as $S_H^{1/2}$, and the secondary current sheet length and width both scale as $S_H^{-1/2}$. These scalings are consistent with a heuristic argument assuming secondary current sheets are close to marginal stability. The distribution of plasmoids as a function of the enclosed flux $\psi$ is found to obey a ${\psi }^{-1}$ power law over an extended range, followed by a rapid fall off for large plasmoids. These results are compared with those from resistive magnetohydrodynamic studies.

Accepted for publication in Physics of Plasmas

References in corpus (6)

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• Fluid vs. kinetic magnetic reconnection with strong guide-fields
• 3D coupled tearing-thermal evolution in solar current sheets
• Do plasmoids induce fast magnetic reconnection in well-resolved current sheets in 2D MHD simulations?
• Triggering tearing in a forming current sheet with the mirror instability