Abstract
Abstract Magnetic reconnection driven by laser plasma interactions attracts great interests in the recent decades. Motivated by the rapid development of the laser technology, the ultra strong magnetic field generated by the laser-plasma accelerated electrons provides unique environment to investigate the relativistic magnetic field annihilation and reconnection. It opens a new way for understanding relativistic regimes of fast magnetic field dissipation particularly in space plasmas, where the large scale magnetic field energy is converted to the energy of the nonthermal charged particles. Here we review the recent results in relativistic magnetic reconnection based on the laser and collisionless plasma interactions. The basic mechanism and the theoretical model are discussed. Several proposed experimental setups for relativistic reconnection research are presented.
Highlights
Magnetic reconnection (MR) rapidly converts the magnetic field energy to the kinetic and thermal energies of the charged particles in plasmas with the topological variations[1,2,3,4]
The magnetic field left behind the ultrashort laser pulse as well as at the vacuum plasma interface has a pattern determined by the electron vortices[122], which can annihilate[123] resulting in the electron and ion acceleration[124,125]
As noticed in a review article[63], the development of highpower lasers provides the necessary conditions for experimental physics where it will become possible to study relativistic regimes of the magnetic field line reconnection, making the area of relativistic laser plasmas attractive for modeling key processes for relativistic astrophysics
Summary
Magnetic reconnection (MR) rapidly converts the magnetic field energy to the kinetic and thermal energies of the charged particles in plasmas with the topological variations[1,2,3,4]. The interactions between ultra-intense laser pulse and plasma generate suprathermal electrons and strong magnetic fields in a short temporal and limited spatial scale. Theoretical and numerical works demonstrated the intensive charged particles acceleration in the MR current sheet driven by inductive electric field and proved the important role of displacement current in such an ultra-relativistic process[76,77]. Recent kinetic simulation in a 3D geometry presented the electron ejection from the non-adiabatic region in MR, the formation and evolution of the current sheet with the growth of tearing-like mode instability[78] Such ultrarelativistic MR is nontrivial and can be accessed in the near. The basic theories will be introduced with the demonstrations of corresponding kinetic simulations performed by the relativistic particle-in-cell code EPOCH[87,88]
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