{
  "id": "1810.09874",
  "version": "v1",
  "published": "2018-10-23T14:20:29.000Z",
  "updated": "2018-10-23T14:20:29.000Z",
  "title": "Onset of secondary instabilities and plasma heating during magnetic reconnection in strongly magnetized regions of the low solar atmosphere",
  "authors": [
    "Lei Ni",
    "Vyacheslav S. Lukin"
  ],
  "categories": [
    "astro-ph.SR"
  ],
  "abstract": "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.",
  "revisions": [
    {
      "version": "v1",
      "updated": "2018-10-23T14:20:29.000Z"
    }
  ],
  "analyses": {
    "keywords": [
      "magnetic reconnection",
      "low solar atmosphere",
      "strongly magnetized regions",
      "current sheet formation process",
      "current sheet aspect ratio"
    ],
    "note": {
      "typesetting": "TeX",
      "pages": 0,
      "language": "en",
      "license": "arXiv",
      "status": "editable"
    }
  }
}