We diagnose local properties of magnetic reconnection during a sawtooth crash employing the three-dimensional toroidal, extended-magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) code M3D-C. To do so, we sample simulation data in the plane in which reconnection occurs, the plane perpendicular to the helical ( ) ( ) = m n , 1, 1 mode at the q=1 surface, where m and n are the poloidal and toroidal mode numbers and q i...

[1] To understand the role of the Hall effect during fast magnetic reconnection, hybrid simulations with and without the Hall term in the generalized Ohm’s Law are compared, as done originally by Karimabadi et al. (2004). It is found that reconnection with the Hall term is fast, but reconnection in the so-called Hall-less hybrid simulations is Sweet-Parker like (slow) when the resistivity is co...

The braiding of the solar coronal magnetic field via photospheric motions – with subsequent relaxation and magnetic reconnection – is one of the most widely debated ideas of solar physics. We readdress the theory in the light of developments in three-dimensional magnetic reconnection theory. It is known that the integrated parallel electric field along field lines is the key quantity determinin...

Spontaneous acceleration of ions to suprathermal energies is observed during magnetic reconnection in the Mega-Ampere Spherical Tokamak (MAST). A high-energy tail is observed in the ion-distribution function following each internal reconnection event in Ohmic discharges. This phenomenon is explained in terms of runaway ion acceleration in the electric field induced by the reconnection.

We argue that magnetic reconnection plays the determining role in many of the various manifestations of solar activity. In particular, it is the trigger mechanism for the most energetic of solar events, coronal mass ejections and eruptive flares. We propose that in order to obtain explosive eruptions, magnetic reconnection in the corona must have an “on-off” nature, and show that reconnection i...

We report a statistical study of flares observed with the Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT) onboard Yohkoh in the year of 2000. We measure physical parameters of 77 flares, such as the temporal scale, the size, and the magnetic flux density and find that the sizes of flares tend to be distributed more broadly as the GOES class becomes weaker and that there is a lower limit of magnetic flux density tha...

Magnetic reconnection is one of the most important processes in astrophysical, space and laboratory plasmas. Identifying the structure around the point at which the magnetic field lines break and subsequently reform, known as the magnetic null point, is crucial to improving our understanding reconnection. But owing to the inherently three-dimensional nature of this process, magnetic nulls are o...

We present two-fluid simulations of forced magnetic reconnection with finite electron inertia in a collisionless two-dimensional slab geometry. Reconnection in this system is driven by a spatially localized forcing function that is added to the ion momentum equation inside the computational domain. The resulting forced reconnection process is studied as a function of the temporal and spatial st...

An emerging paradigm for the dissipation of magnetic turbulence in the supersonic solar wind is via localized quasi2D small-scale magnetic island reconnection processes. An advection-diffusion transport equation for a nearly isotropic particle distribution describes particle transport and energization in a region of interacting magnetic islands [1; 2]. The dominant charged particle energization...