Scaling of Driven Magnetic Reconnection Rates

Computational experiments in various collisionality regimes show that, when the drive is unambiguously separated from the reconnection region, driven magnetic reconnection, in its idealized and extensively studied two dimensional form, proceeds at a rate determined only by the boundary conditions. Within certain bounds, details of the physics model used in studying this ubiquitous phenomenon play only a peripheral role: they determine the structure of the reconnection layer but not the overall reconnection rate. Therefore, scaling laws for models where this separation is absent will tend to be problem specific features, not universal laws of driven magnetic reconnection. PACS numbers: 52.30.Ex, 52.35.Vd, 52.65.Kj