Abstract
The role of magnetic islands in collisionless driven reconnection has been investigated from the standpoint of a kinetic approach to multi-scale phenomena by means of two-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. There are two different types of the solutions in the evolution of the reconnection system. One is a steady solution in which the system relaxes into a steady state, and no island is generated (the no-island case). The other is an intermittent solution in which the system does not reach a steady state, and magnetic islands are frequently generated in the current sheet (the multi-island case). It is found that the electromagnetic energy is more effectively transferred to the particle energy in the multi-island case compared with the no-island case. The transferred energy is stored inside the magnetic island in the form of the thermal energy through compressional heating, and is carried away together with the magnetic island from the reconnection region. These results suggest that the formation of a magnetic island chain may have a potential to bridge the energy gap between macroscopic and microscopic physics by widening the dissipation region and strengthening the energy dissipation rate.
Highlights
A physical system, in which magnetic reconnection takes place as one of key processes, evolves dynamically with time and reveals various interesting features such as rapid energy release, intermittency, self-organization, and so on [1,2]
In order to solve these problems, we developed a particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation model for the magnetic reconnection study in an open system, known as “PASMO”, in which the information of the macroscopic physics is introduced for boundary conditions, and only a microscopic reconnection system is solved under given boundary conditions [3,4,19]
In this paper we investigate the role of magnetic islands in collisionless driven reconnection from the standpoint of a kinetic approach to multi-scale phenomena using the PASMO code, focusing in particular on energy transfer
Summary
A physical system, in which magnetic reconnection takes place as one of key processes, evolves dynamically with time and reveals various interesting features such as rapid energy release, intermittency, self-organization, and so on [1,2]. In order to solve these problems, we developed a particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation model for the magnetic reconnection study in an open system, known as “PASMO”, in which the information of the macroscopic physics is introduced for boundary conditions, and only a microscopic reconnection system is solved under given boundary conditions [3,4,19]. This PASMO code enables us to investigate the long time scale behavior of magnetic reconnection as well as the microscopic triggering mechanism of magnetic reconnection. In this paper we investigate the role of magnetic islands in collisionless driven reconnection from the standpoint of a kinetic approach to multi-scale phenomena using the PASMO code, focusing in particular on energy transfer
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