Ion diamagnetic effects on collisionless magnetic reconnection are investigated by means of numerical simulations of a Hamiltonian gyrofluid model. The work is focused in particular on the effects of inhomogeneous density equilibria in the large ∆′ regime. The linear growth rates predicted by asymptotic theory are recovered. Nonlinearly the island shape is strongly modified and the flow changes...

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A three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulation in a large system demonstrates that a kink mode significantly contributes to a fast reconnection by providing magnetic dissipation through anomalous resistivity. The anomalous resistivity is generated due to the electron heating in the thin electron current sheet. It is interesting that, although the kink mode broadens the width of the current she...

Magnetic reconnection is widely believed responsible for heating the solar corona as well as for generating X-rays and energetic particles in solar flares. On astrophysical scales, reconnection in the intergalactic plasma is a prime candidate for a local source (!100 Mpc) of cosmic rays exceeding the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kúzmin cutoff (∼1019 eV). In a laboratory astrophysics experiment, we have mad...

We investigate mechanisms of energy extraction from a rotating black hole in terms of negative energy-at-infinity. In addition to the Penrose process through particle fission, the Blandford-Znajek mechanism by magnetic tension, and the magnetohydrodynamic Penrose process, we examine energy extraction from a black hole caused by magnetic reconnection in the ergosphere. The reconnection redistrib...

Particle-in-cell simulations of collisionless magnetic reconnection are presented that demonstrate that reconnection remains fast in very large systems. The electron dissipation region develops a distinct two-scale structure along the outflow direction. Consistent with fast reconnection, the length of the electron current layer stabilizes and decreases with decreasing electron mass, approaching...

We report Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) observations of electrons, ions, and magnetic fields which provide comprehensive demonstration of magnetic reconnection signatures in the Martian magnetotail. In the near-Mars tail current sheet at XMSO ∼−1.3RM, trapped electrons with two-sided loss cones were observed, indicating the closed magnetic field topology. In the closed field re...

We investigate favourable circumstances for fast magnetic reconnection in astrophysical plasmas based on recent results by Rogers et al. (2001). Given that a critical magnetic field structure with antiparallel field lines exists, our analysis demonstrates that a sufficient condition for fast reconnection is that the ratio of the thermal pressure to the magnetic field pressure β should be signif...

This article describes the recent findings on two-fluid effects on magnetic reconnection in plasmas with variable collisionality in the magnetic reconnection experiment MRX M. Yamada et al., Phys. Plasmas 4, 1936 1997 . The MRX device has been upgraded to accommodate a variety of reconnection operation modes and high energy density experiments by increasing its capacitor bank energy and extendi...