Optimal Energy Growth in Current Sheets

Current sheets from Ulysses observation

Current sheet is a significant source of solar wind MHD turbulence intermittency. It has long been recognized that these structures can arise from non-linear interactions of MHD turbulence. Alternatively, they may also be relic structures in the solar wind that have a solar origin, e.g., magnetic walls of flux tubes that separate solar wind plasma into distinct parcels. Identifying these struct...

Quasi-adiabaticity in bifurcated current sheets

Magnetoacoustic wave propagation in current sheets

Magnetoacoustic waves in a Harris neutral current sheet are investigated. The magnetic field strength, Alfvén speed, sound speed and plasma density vary continuously across the structure. The sheet supports body, surface and hybrid modes. Two surface modes exist (a kink and a sausage). In addition, fundamental and harmonic body waves are found when their phase speeds approach the maximum Alfvén...

Electron Orbits in Solar Reconnecting Current Sheets

We investigate the orbits of charged particles (electrons) that interact with a 3D-solar type reconnecting current sheet (RCS). The magnetic field used is a linearized Harris type model. Particles are accelerated by a super-Dreicer electric field. Taking advantage of the translational symmetries of the fields, the orbits computation is simplified to integration of the equations of motion in a H...

Particle acceleration in relativistic current sheets.

Relativistic current sheets have been proposed as the sites of dissipation in pulsar winds, jets in active galaxies, and other Poynting flux dominated flows. It is shown that the steady versions of these structures differ from their nonrelativistic counterparts because they do not permit transformation to a de Hofmann-Teller frame with zero electric field. Instead, their generic form is that of...