Instability of current sheets and formation of plasmoid chains
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.
- Publication:
-
Physics of Plasmas
- Pub Date:
- October 2007
- DOI:
- 10.1063/1.2783986
- arXiv:
- arXiv:astro-ph/0703631
- Bibcode:
- 2007PhPl...14j0703L
- Keywords:
-
- 52.35.Vd;
- 52.35.Py;
- 94.30.-d;
- 94.30.cp;
- 96.60.Iv;
- Magnetic reconnection;
- Macroinstabilities;
- Physics of the magnetosphere;
- Astrophysics;
- Physics - Plasma Physics;
- Physics - Space Physics
- E-Print:
- revtex, 4 pages, 4 figures