Speaker
Dr
Dhrubaditya Mitra
Description
We study the role of turbulence in magnetic reconnection,
within the framework of magneto-hydrodynamics, using
three-dimensional direct numerical simulations. For small
turbulent intensity we find that the reconnection rate obeys
Sweet-Parker scaling. For large enough turbulent intensity
reconnection rate departs significantly from Sweet-Parker
behaviour, becomes almost a constant as a function of the
Lundquist number. We further study energisation of test-
particles in the same setup. We find that the speed of the
energised particles obeys a Maxwellian distribution, whose
variance also obeys Sweet-Parker scaling for small turbulent
intensity but depends weakly on the Lundquist number for
large turbulent intensity. Furthermore, the variance is found
to increase with the strength of the reconnecting magnetic
field.
Primary author
Dr
Dhrubaditya Mitra
