Instability of current sheets and formation of plasmoid chains
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Current sheets formed in magnetic reconnection events are found to be unstable to high-wavenumber perturbations. The instability is very fast: its maximum growth rate scales as S^{1/4} v_A/L, where L is the length of the sheet, v_A the Alfven speed and S the Lundquist number. As a result, a chain of plasmoids (secondary islands) is formed, whose number scales as S^{3/8}.
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Forward citations
Cited by 2 Pith papers
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Tearing of charged current layers
Charged current layers are electrostatically unstable with Bernstein waves redistributing charge and altering tearing, producing mildly charged plasmoids in Harris sheets and faster tearing in some rotational cases.
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Magnetic Prandtl number dependence of plasmoid-mediated reconnection
In the fully plasmoid-mediated regime the reconnection rate becomes nearly independent of the magnetic Prandtl number.
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