Magnetic reconnection in a comparison of topology and helicities in two and three dimensional resistive MHD simulations

Abstract

Through a direct comparison between numerical simulations in two and three dimensions, we investigate topological effects in reconnection. A simple estimate on increase in reconnection rate in three dimensions by a factor of $\sqrt{2}$, when compared with a two-dimensional case, is confirmed in our simulations. We also show that both the reconnection rate and the fraction of magnetic energy in the simulations depend linearly on the height of the reconnection region. The degree of structural complexity of a magnetic field and the underlying flow is measured by current helicity and cross-helicity. We compare results in simulations with different computational box heights.

arXiv commentAccepted in Physics of Plasmas

References in corpus (5)

• Reconnection in a Weakly Stochastic Field
• The PLUTO Code for Adaptive Mesh Computations in Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics
• Imaging coronal magnetic-field reconnection in a solar flare
• Three-dimensional magnetic reconnection regimes: A review
• Magnetospheric Accretion and Ejection of Matter in Resistive Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Estimating the rate of field line braiding in the solar corona by photospheric flows
• Energy distribution and substructure formation in astrophysical MHD simulations