Plasmoid instability in a large post-CME current sheet system

Solar flares and CME that cause violent space weather change have been studied for years. The standard model suggests that there is a current sheet connecting the CME and the site of the post-CME flare after the eruption, but understanding of the detailed physical mechanism of dynamical processes in the current sheet remains incomplete. Recently, the secondary plasmoid instabilities of large scale current sheet in high Lundquist number environment such as solar corona and the change of magnetic topology in such a current sheet system has become a subject of great interest (Bhattacharjee et al. 2009). In our work, we study a post-CME current sheet via both observation and simulation. We use SOHO/LASCO observations of a fast halo CME as well as a slow CME. After the fast halo CME event on January 8, 2002, we observe a long, thin current sheet which connects the CME to a flare site on the surface of the sun. In this current sheet we identify over 60 bright plasmoid-like blobs in 39 hours. In the slow CME event on June 25, 2005, we observe 32 such blobs in 18 hours after the formation of the current sheet. We simulate both cases using high-Lundquist-number resistive MHD simulations of the model of Lin & Forbes (2000), and demonstrate that the distribution of plasmoid size in both cases appears to conform well to a distribution function that is independent of the Lundquist number and predicted by theory. The average observed plasmoid speed in both cases is a fraction of the typical Alfven speed, qualitatively consistent with the simulations. Thus, we propose that these observations can be plausibly accounted for by the plasmoid instability of the large-scale current sheet. The observed bright blobs are probably evidence of large-scale plasmoids, and their behavior appears to be qualitatively consistent with high-Lundquist-number MHD simulations.<br />observation case summary
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