The interior structure of reconnected flux tubes in a sheared plasma flow

Two basic processes for producing twisted magnetic flux tubes are reconnection between skewed magnetic fields, and plasma motion causing twining or braiding of flux tubes/flux elements. The properties of the latter mechanism are studied for flux that is reconnected across a neutral sheet. If the neutral sheet is formed by skewed magnetic fields with a flow shear across the sheet, the direction of the twist may be predicted in terms of background magnetoplasma quantities. If the results are applied to flux transfer events (FTEs) we expect that the vast majority of FTEs have a twist and axial B y component determined by IMF B y . However, we also expect there to be a few cases where the flow shear will reverse the sense of both of these quantities.