Plasmoid-dominated Turbulent Reconnection in a Low $\beta$ Plasma

Abstract

Properties of plasmoid-dominated turbulent reconnection in a low-$\beta$ background plasma are investigated by resistive magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations. In the ${\beta }_{\mathrm{in}}<1$ regime, where ${\beta }_{\mathrm{in}}$ is plasma $\beta$ in the inflow region, the reconnection site is dominated by shocks and shock-related structures and plasma compression is significant. The effective reconnection rate increases from $0.01$ to $0.02$ as ${\beta }_{\mathrm{in}}$ decreases. We hypothesize that plasma compression allows faster reconnection rate, and then we estimate a speed-up factor, based on a compressible MHD theory. We validate our prediction by a series of MHD simulations. These results suggest that the plasmoid-dominated reconnection can be twice faster than expected in the $\beta \ll 1$ environment in a solar corona.

arXiv comment6 pages, 5 figures; f90 codes are attached; see ancillary files in the "Other formats" link

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Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Super-Fermi Acceleration in Multiscale MHD Reconnection
• Slow Shock Formation Upstream of Reconnecting Current Sheets
• Petschek-type reconnection in the high-Lundquist-number regime during nonlinear evolution on the tilt instability