The role of guide field on magnetic reconnection during island coalescence

Stanier, Adam John; Daughton, William Scott; Simakov, Andrei Nikolaevich; Chacon, Luis; Le, Ari Yitzchak; Karimabadi, Homa; Ng, Jonathan; Bhattacharjee, Amitava

doi:10.1063/1.4976712

Title: The role of guide field on magnetic reconnection during island coalescence

Journal Article · Wed Feb 01 00:00:00 EST 2017 · Physics of Plasmas

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4976712· OSTI ID:1369174

Stanier, Adam John ^[1];

^[1];

^[1]; Karimabadi, Homa ^[2]; Ng, Jonathan ^[3]; Bhattacharjee, Amitava ^[3]

Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Sciberquest, Del Mar, CA (United States)
Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. (PPPL), Princeton, NJ (United States)

A number of studies have considered how the rate of magnetic reconnection scales in large and weakly collisional systems by the modelling of long reconnecting current sheets. However, this set-up neglects both the formation of the current sheet and the coupling between the diffusion region and a larger system that supplies the magnetic flux. Recent studies of magnetic island merging, which naturally include these features, have found that ion kinetic physics is crucial to describe the reconnection rate and global evolution of such systems. In this paper, the effect of a guide field on reconnection during island merging is considered. In contrast to the earlier current sheet studies, we identify a limited range of guide fields for which the reconnection rate, outflow velocity, and pile-up magnetic field increase in magnitude as the guide field increases. The Hall-MHD fluid model is found to reproduce kinetic reconnection rates only for a sufficiently strong guide field, for which ion inertia breaks the frozen-in condition and the outflow becomes Alfvénic in the kinetic system. The merging of large islands occurs on a longer timescale in the zero guide field limit, which may in part be due to a mirror-like instability that occurs upstream of the reconnection region.

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Research Organization:: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE Office of Science (SC). Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) (SC-24); USDOE

Grant/Contract Number:: AC52-06NA25396

OSTI ID:: 1369174

Alternate ID(s):: OSTI ID: 1349353

Report Number(s):: LA-UR-16-28828

Journal Information:: Physics of Plasmas, Vol. 24, Issue 2; ISSN 1070-664X

Publisher:: American Institute of Physics (AIP)Copyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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Cited by: 17 works

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