TY - JOUR
T1 - Momentum transport and nonlocality in heat-flux-driven magnetic reconnection in high-energy-density plasmas
AU - Liu, Chang
AU - Fox, William
AU - Bhattacharjee, Amitava
AU - Thomas, Alexander G.R.
AU - Joglekar, Archis S.
N1 - Funding Information:
C.L. thanks John Krommes, Gregory W. Hammett, and Eero Hirvijoki for valuable discussions. The PIC simulations in this work were conducted on the Hopper and Cori supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, supported by the U. S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, and the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Contracts No. DE-SC0008655, No. DE-SC0010621, and No. DE-SC0016249. A.S.J. would like to acknowledge support from DE-NA0002953 and NSF ACI-1339893.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 American Physical Society.
PY - 2017/10/6
Y1 - 2017/10/6
N2 - Recent theory has demonstrated a novel physics regime for magnetic reconnection in high-energy-density plasmas where the magnetic field is advected by heat flux via the Nernst effect. Here we elucidate the physics of the electron dissipation layer in this regime. Through fully kinetic simulation and a generalized Ohm's law derived from first principles, we show that momentum transport due to a nonlocal effect, the heat-flux-viscosity, provides the dissipation mechanism for magnetic reconnection. Scaling analysis, and simulations show that the reconnection process comprises a magnetic field compression stage and quasisteady reconnection stage, and the characteristic width of the current sheet in this regime is several electron mean-free paths. These results show the important interplay between nonlocal transport effects and generation of anisotropic components to the distribution function.
AB - Recent theory has demonstrated a novel physics regime for magnetic reconnection in high-energy-density plasmas where the magnetic field is advected by heat flux via the Nernst effect. Here we elucidate the physics of the electron dissipation layer in this regime. Through fully kinetic simulation and a generalized Ohm's law derived from first principles, we show that momentum transport due to a nonlocal effect, the heat-flux-viscosity, provides the dissipation mechanism for magnetic reconnection. Scaling analysis, and simulations show that the reconnection process comprises a magnetic field compression stage and quasisteady reconnection stage, and the characteristic width of the current sheet in this regime is several electron mean-free paths. These results show the important interplay between nonlocal transport effects and generation of anisotropic components to the distribution function.
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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevE.96.043203
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevE.96.043203
M3 - Article
C2 - 29347495
AN - SCOPUS:85031026914
SN - 2470-0045
VL - 96
JO - Physical Review E
JF - Physical Review E
IS - 4
M1 - 043203
ER -