Abstract
Current sheets formed in magnetic reconnection events are found to be unstable to high-wavenumber perturbations. The instability is very fast: its maximum growth rate scales as S1/4vA/LCS, where LCS is the length of the sheet, vA the Alfvén speed, and S the Lundquist number. As a result, a chain of plasmoids (secondary islands) is formed, whose number scales as S3/8.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 100703 |
Journal | Physics of Plasmas |
Volume | 14 |
Issue number | 10 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2007 |
Externally published | Yes |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Condensed Matter Physics