@article{f0c95be213994ae4864ae39417fa841e,
title = "Electromagnetic instability of thin reconnection layers: Comparison of three-dimensional simulations with MRX observations",
abstract = "The influence of current-aligned instabilities on magnetic reconnection in weakly collisional regimes is investigated using experimental observations from Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (MRX) [M. Yamada, Phys. Plasmas 4, 1936 (1997)] and large-scale fully kinetic simulations. In the simulations as well as in the experiment, the dominant instability is localized near the center of the reconnection layer, produces large perturbations of the magnetic field, and is characterized by the wavenumber that is a geometric mean between electron and ion gyroradii k ∼ (ρe ρi)-1/2. However, both the simulations and the experimental observations suggest the instability is not the dominant reconnection mechanism under parameters typical of MRX.",
author = "V. Roytershteyn and S. Dorfman and W. Daughton and H. Ji and M. Yamada and H. Karimabadi",
note = "Funding Information: We gratefully acknowledge support the from NSF/DOE program on basic plasma physics (Award No. 1202018), the U.S. Department of Energy through the LANL/LDRD Program, and from NASA's Heliophysics Theory Program. Contributions from MRX group were partially supported by DOE Office of Sciences—Fusion Energy Science under Contract No. DE-AC02-09CH11466 and NASA Geospace Science Award NNH10AO47I. S.D. was supported by a DOE FES Fellowship and the NDSEG Fellowship Program. Some of the simulations were performed on Roadrunner supercomputer at LANL supported through the Advanced Simulation and Computing program. In addition, this research utilized computational resources of the following centers: Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725; National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. Additional simulations were performed using resources provided by the NASA High-End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center.",
year = "2013",
month = jun,
doi = "10.1063/1.4811371",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "20",
journal = "Physics of Plasmas",
issn = "1070-664X",
publisher = "American Institute of Physics Publising LLC",
number = "6",
}