[GTP] GTP/IMAGe-HAO Seminar

[Liz Aikin]

Special GTP/IMAGe-HAO Seminar:

Giovanni Lapenta,
Centre for Plasma Astrophysics, Catholic University of Leuven
11:00 am
Friday Dec 12, 2008
CG1 Captain Mary Room
(coffee/tea 10:45am)

Fast turbulent reconnection regime in the fluid MHD limit

Within a MHD approach we find magnetic reconnection to progress in
two entirely different ways. The first is well known: the laminar
Sweet-Parker process. But a second, completely different and chaotic
reconnection process is possible. This regime has properties of
immediate practical relevance: (i) it is much faster, developing on
scales of the order of the Alfvén time, and (ii) the areas of
reconnection become distributed chaotically over a macroscopic
region. The onset of the faster process is the formation of closed-
circulation patterns where the jets going out of the reconnection
regions turn around and force their way back in, carrying along
copious amounts of magnetic flux. This new discovery was reported
recently on Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 235001 (2008) [http://link.aps.org/
abstract/PRL/v100/e235001]
We summarize the new discovery and provide its extension to include
3D regimes and we present the practical application to reconnection
in a stratified equilibrium representative of the solar chromosphere
and corona.

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Liz Aikin                    Tel: 303 497-1351
IMAGe Administrator		 Fax: 303 497-2483
Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences (IMAGe) 
P.O. Box 3000
Boulder, CO 80307-3000