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Role of electron physics in the development of turbulent magnetic reconnection in collisionless plasmas

Nature Physics volume 7, pages 539–542 (2011)Cite this article

Abstract

Magnetic reconnection releases energy explosively as field lines break and reconnect in plasmas ranging from the Earth’s magnetosphere to solar eruptions and astrophysical applications. Collisionless kinetic simulations have shown that this process involves both ion and electron kinetic-scale features, with electron current layers forming nonlinearly during the onset phase and playing an important role in enabling field lines to break1,2,3,4. In larger two-dimensional studies, these electron current layers become highly extended, which can trigger the formation of secondary magnetic islands5,6,7,8,9,10, but the influence of realistic three-dimensional dynamics remains poorly understood. Here we show that, for the most common type of reconnection layer with a finite guide field, the three-dimensional evolution is dominated by the formation and interaction of helical magnetic structures known as flux ropes. In contrast to previous theories11, the majority of flux ropes are produced by secondary instabilities within the electron layers. New flux ropes spontaneously appear within these layers, leading to a turbulent evolution where electron physics plays a central role.

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Figure 1: Formation of primary flux ropes.
Figure 2: Theoretical predictions for oblique tearing instability.
Figure 3: Formation of secondary flux ropes.
Figure 4: Development of turbulent reconnection.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge support from the US Department of Energy through the LANL/LDRD Program and through the Advanced Simulation and Computing program for access to Roadrunner computing resources. Simulations carried out on Kraken were supported by an allocation of advanced computing resources provided by the National Science Foundation at the National Institute for Computational Sciences (http://www.nics.tennessee.edu/). Contributions from H.K. were supported by NASA through the Heliophysics Theory Program and NSF through ATM 0802380. We thank K. Quest and J. T. Gosling for discussions and P. Fasel, J. Patchett, J. Ahrens, B. Loring, B. Geveci and D. Partyka for assistance with interfacing the simulation data with ParaView visualization software.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA

    W. Daughton, V. Roytershteyn, L. Yin, B. J. Albright, B. Bergen & K. J. Bowers

  2. University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA

    H. Karimabadi

Authors
  1. W. Daughton
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  2. V. Roytershteyn
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  3. H. Karimabadi
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  4. L. Yin
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  5. B. J. Albright
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  7. K. J. Bowers
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Contributions

W.D. carried out the kinetic simulations and wrote the paper. W.D., V.R. and H.K. carried out the analytic theory. V.R. carried out the spectral analysis. K.J.B. originally developed the VPIC code and L.Y., B.J.A., B.B. and K.J.B. ported and tested the VPIC code for petascale supercomputers. All of the authors discussed the results and commented on the paper.

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Correspondence to W. Daughton.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Daughton, W., Roytershteyn, V., Karimabadi, H. et al. Role of electron physics in the development of turbulent magnetic reconnection in collisionless plasmas. Nature Phys 7, 539–542 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1965

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