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Effects of global boundary and local collisionality on magnetic reconnection in a laboratory plasma
Author(s) -
Kuritsyn A.,
Ji H.,
Gerhardt S. P.,
Ren Y.,
Yamada M.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2007gl030796
Subject(s) - collisionality , magnetic reconnection , physics , current sheet , plasma , range (aeronautics) , computational physics , magnetohydrodynamics , materials science , nuclear physics , composite material , tokamak
The magnetic reconnection process is studied in a wide range of operating conditions in the well‐controlled Magnetic Reconnection Experiment. The reconnection rate is observed to be a function of both global (system size) and local (collisionality) plasma parameters. When only local collisionality is lowered, the current sheet is shortened while effective resistivity is enhanced, both accelerating reconnection rates. At a fixed collisionality, the current sheet length increases with system size, resulting in the reduction of the reconnection rate. These results quantitatively agree with a generalized Sweet‐Parker analysis.