Onset of secondary instabilities and plasma heating during magnetic reconnection in strongly magnetized regions of the low solar atmosphere

Lei Ni, Vyacheslav S. Lukin

Published 2018-10-23Version 1

We numerically study magnetic reconnection on different spatial scales and at different heights in the weakly ionized plasma of the low solar atmosphere (around $300-800$~km above the solar surface) within a reactive 2.5 D multi-fluid plasma-neutral model. We consider a strongly magnetized plasma ($\beta \sim 6\% $) evolving from a force-free magnetic configuration and perturbed to initialize formation of a reconnection current sheet. On large scales, the resulting current sheets are observed to undergo a secondary 'plasmoid' instability. A series of simulations at different scales demonstrate a cascading current sheet formation process that terminates for current sheets with width of ~2m and length of $\sim100$~m, corresponding to the critical current sheet aspect ratio of $\sim50$. We also observe that the plasmoid instability is the primary physical mechanism accelerating the magnetic reconnection in this plasma parameter regime. After plasmoid instabilities appear, the reconnection rate sharply increases to a value of $\sim$ 0.035, observed to be independent of the Lundquist number. These characteristics are very similar to magnetic reconnection in fully ionized plasmas. In this low $\beta$ guide field reconnection regime, both the recombination and collisionless effects are observed to have a small contribution to the reconnection rate. The simulations show that it is difficult to heat the dense weakly ionized photospheric plasmas to above $2\times10^4$~K during the magnetic reconnection process. However, the plasmas in the low solar chromosphere can be heated above $3\times10^4$~K with reconnection magnetic fields of $500$~G or stronger.