The evolution of solar magnetic arcades is investigated with the use of MHD simulations imposing resistivity on sheared magnetic elds. It is found that there is a critical amount of shear, over which magnetic reconnection can take place in an arcade-like eld geometry to create a magnetic island. The process leading to reconnection cannot be solely attributed to a tearing instability, but rather...

The importance of magnetic reconnection as an energy release mechanism in many solar, stellar, magnetospheric and astrophysical phenomena has long been recognised. Reconnection is the only mechanism by which magnetic fields can globally restructure, enabling them to access a lower energy state. Over the past decade, there have been some major advances in our understanding of threedimensional re...

Citation: Treumann RA and Baumjohann W (2015) Broad current sheets, current bifurcation, and collisionless reconnection—An Opinion on " Onset of fast magnetic reconnection via subcritical bifurcation " by Z. Magnetic reconnection in current carrying plasmas, in particular when the plasma is collisionless, is an efficient channel of dissipating the energy temporarily stored in electric currents ...

The fundamental physics of magnetic reconnection in laboratory and space plasmas is reviewed by discussing results from theory, numerical simulations, observations from space satellites, and recent results from laboratory plasma experiments. After a brief review of the well-known early work, representative recent experimental and theoretical works are discussed and the essence of significant mo...

Two-dimensional, nonlinear, Hall-magnetohydrodynamical ~MHD! numerical simulations are used to investigate the scaling of the rate of forced magnetic reconnection in the so-called Taylor problem. In this problem, a small amplitude boundary perturbation is suddenly applied to a tearing stable, slab plasma equilibrium. The perturbation is such as to drive magnetic reconnection within the plasma. ...

Many extended extragalactic radio sources require a local in situ acceleration mechanism for electrons, in part because the synchrotron lifetimes are shorter than the bulk travel time across the emitting regions. If the magnetic field in these sources is localized in flux tubes, reconnection may occur between regions of plasma β (ratio of particle to magnetic pressure) << 1, even though β avera...

The high-power heating of magnetic reconnection has been applied to the ultra-high-beta ST formation in the TS-3, TS-4 and UTST merging experiments. Two low-beta ST plasmas were formed inductively by two or four PF coils without using any central solenoid (CS) and were merged for high power MW-GW reconnection heating. Cause and mechanism for the reconnection heating were directly measured for t...

We test and compare a number of existing models predicting the location of magnetic reconnection at Earth’s dayside magnetopause for various solar wind conditions. We employ robust image processing techniques to determine the locations where each model predicts reconnection to occur. The predictions are then compared to the magnetic separators, the magnetic field lines separating different magn...

The classic accepted view of the heliosphere is a quiescent, comet-like shape aligned in the direction of the Sun’s travel through the interstellar medium (ISM) extending for thousands of astronomical units (AUs). Here, we show, based on magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations, that the tension (hoop) force of the twisted magnetic field of the Sun confines the solar wind plasma beyond the termina...

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 pl...