In collisionless reconnection in space plasma like the magnetospheric tail or magnetopause current layer, magnetic fields can grow from thermal level by the action of the non-magnetic Weibel instability driven in thin (∆ < few λi) current layers by the counter-streaming electron inflow from the ‘ion diffusion’ (ion inertial Hall) region into the inner current (electron inertial) region from whe...

Hybrid simulations with electron inertia, along with analytic scaling arguments, are presented which demonstrate that magnetic reconnection remains Alfv6nic in a collisionless system even as the macroscopic scale length of the system becomes very large. This fast reconnection is facilitated by the whistler physics present near the x-line. The reconnection rate is found to be a universal constan...

The main subject of my talk is the question: in what kind of astrophysical systems magnetic reconnection is interesting and/or important? To address this question, I first put forward three general criteria for selecting the relevant astrophysical environments. Namely, reconnection should be: fast; energetically important; and observable. From this, I deduce that the gas density should be low, ...

Simulations of collisionless magnetic reconnection show a dramatic enhancement of the nonlinear reconnection rate due to the formation of an open outflow region. We link the formation of this open configuration to dispersive whistler and kinetic Alfvén wave dynamics at small scales. The roles of these two waves are controlled by two dimensionless parameters, which allow us to identify regions o...

Articles you may be interested in A review of pressure anisotropy caused by electron trapping in collisionless plasma, and its implications for magnetic reconnection The effects of strong temperature anisotropy on the kinetic structure of collisionless slow shocks and reconnection exhausts. A particle-in-cell simulation shows that the exhaust during anti-parallel reconnection in the collisionle...

Solar eruptions occur when magnetic energy is suddenly converted into heat and kinetic energy by magnetic reconnection in a current sheet (CS). It is often assumed that CSs are too thin to be observable because the electric resistivity in CSs is taken to be very small. In this work, we show the implications for the CS thickness he d estimated from observations of three eruptions by the UVCS and...

In this series of papers we examine magnetic reconnection in a domain where the magnetic field does not vanish and the non-ideal region is localised in space. In a previous paper we presented a technique for obtaining analytical solutions to the stationary resistive MHD equations in such a situation and examined specific examples of non-ideal reconnective solutions. Here we further develop the ...

We present particle-in-cell simulations of collisionless magnetic reconnection in a system (like the magnetopause) with a large density asymmetry across the current layer. In the presence of an ambient component of the magnetic field perpendicular to the reconnection plane the gradient creates a diamagnetic drift that advects the X-line with the electron diamagnetic velocity. When the relative ...

We report multispacecraft Cluster observations of magnetic reconnection at the high-latitude magnetopause/magnetospheric boundary layer (MP/BL) under mainly northward interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) conditions. The event we study is on 3 December 2001 when the Cluster spacecraft were skimming the high-latitude duskside MP/BL during a period of about four hours. The orbit and configuration o...

We present measurements of a magnetic reconnection in a plasma created by two laser beams (1 ns pulse duration, 1 x 10(15) W cm(-2)) focused in close proximity on a planar solid target. Simultaneous optical probing and proton grid deflectometry reveal two high velocity, collimated outflowing jets and 0.7-1.3 MG magnetic fields at the focal spot edges. Thomson scattering measurements from the re...