Role of dispersive waves in collisionless magnetic reconnection.

Do dispersive waves play a role in collisionless magnetic reconnection?

Generation of Alfvén Waves by Small-Scale Magnetic Reconnection in Solar Spicules

Alfvén waves dissipation is an extensively studied mechanism for the coronal heating problem. These waves can be generated by magnetic reconnection and propagated along the reconnected field lines. Here, we study the generation of Alfvén waves at the presence of both steady flow and sheared magnetic field in the longitudinally density stratified of solar spicules. The initial flow is assumed to...

The role of electron dissipation on the rate of collisionless magnetic reconnection

Particle simulations and analytic arguments are presented to demonstrate that the electron dissipation region, including the physics which breaks the frozen-in condition, does not affect the rate of reconnection in collisionless plasma. The result is a general consequence of the quadratic nature of the dispersion character of whistler waves, which control the plasma dynamics at small scales. Th...

Collisionless reconnection using Alfvén wave radiation resistance

Patchy magnetic reconnection involves transient field-aligned current filaments. The spatial localization, transient time-dependence, and orientation of these current filaments means they must radiate torsional Alfvén waves. Radiation of wave energy does not come for free—it must load the current which acts as the radiative source. This loading ~radiation resistance! is proposed as the energy s...

A saddle-node bifurcation model of magnetic reconnection onset

It was recently shown that magnetic reconnection exhibits bistability, where the Sweet–Parker collisional and Hall collisionless reconnection solutions are both attainable for the same set of system parameters. Here, a dynamical model based on saddle-node bifurcations is presented which reproduces the slow to fast transition. It is argued that the properties of the dynamical model are a result ...