Energisation of charged particles by fast magnetic reconnection

by Dhrubaditya Mitra

Wednesday 16 Nov 2016, 13:30 → 14:40 Europe/Stockholm

122:026

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 scal- ing. 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 vari- ance 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.