1998/04/16 by A. Lazarian, Lazarian, A., Ethan T. Vishniac +1
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Structural Analysis of Composite Materials #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/9804166
12 pages, 1 figure, submitted to ApJ
arxiv created 1998/04/16 · openalex publication_date 1998/04/16 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We discuss the role of tearing instabilities in magnetic reconnection. In three dimensions this instability leads to the formation of strong Alfvenic waves that remove plasma efficiently from the reconnection layer. As a result the instability proceeds at high rates while staying close to the linear regime. Our calculations show that for a resistive fluid the reconnection speed scales as the product of the Alfven speed VA over the magnetic Reynolds number to the power -0.3. In the limit of vanishing resistivity, tearing modes proceed at a non-zero rate, driven by the electron inertia term, giving rise to a reconnection speed VA (c/ωp Lx)3/5, where ωp is the plasma frequency and Lx is the transverse scale of the reconnection layer. Formally this solves the problem of fast reconnection, but in practice this reconnection speed is small.