Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Takamoto, Makoto
• Inoue, Tsuyoshi
• Lazarian, Alexandre

Titel

TURBULENT RECONNECTION IN RELATIVISTIC PLASMAS AND EFFECTS OF COMPRESSIBILITY

Ist Teil von

• The Astrophysical journal, 2015-12, Vol.815 (1), p.16

Ort / Verlag

United States: The American Astronomical Society

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Quelle

EZB-FREE-00999 freely available EZB journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• ABSTRACT We report on the turbulence effects on magnetic reconnection in relativistic plasmas using three-dimensional relativistic resistive magnetohydrodynamics simulations. We found that the reconnection rate became independent of the plasma resistivity due to turbulence effects similarly to non-relativistic cases. We also found that compressible turbulence effects modified the turbulent reconnection rate predicted in non-relativistic incompressible plasmas; the reconnection rate saturates, and even decays, as the injected velocity approaches to the Alfvén velocity. Our results indicate that compressibility cannot be neglected when a compressible component becomes about half of the incompressible mode, occurring when the Alfvén Mach number reaches about 0.3. The obtained maximum reconnection rate is around 0.05-0.1, which will be able to reach around 0.1-0.2 if injection scales are comparable to the sheet length.