HR: 0800h
AN: SM31D-0662    [Abstracts]
TI: Forced Magnetic Reconnection with Open Boundary Conditions
AU: * WAN, W
EM: weigang.wan@gmail.com
AF: Los Alamos National Laboratory, M.S. K717, P.O. Box 1663, Los Alamos, NM 87544, United States
AU: Lapenta, G
EM: giovanni.lapenta@wis.kuleuven.be
AF: Los Alamos National Laboratory, M.S. K717, P.O. Box 1663, Los Alamos, NM 87544, United States
AU: Lapenta, G
EM: giovanni.lapenta@wis.kuleuven.be
AF: Centrum voor Plasma-Astrofysica, Departement Wiskunde, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200B, Leuven, 3001, Belgium
AB: We present kinetic simulations of collisionless forced magnetic reconnection driven by different models of magnetic flux inflows, with open boundary conditions applied in the outflow directions. We use the implicit Particle-in-Cell code CELESTE3D [1], which retains kinetic effects for both electrons and ions. Different from results of fluid simulations, the reconnection rate is intermittent rather than steady even when the driving inflow is constant. Similar to the pervious discoveries by W. Daughton et al. [2], we find secondary islands grow as the electron diffusion region is elongated over time. For the well-studied Newton Challenge reconnection problem, compared to results with periodic boundary conditions, here we find that with the open boundaries, at the same driving amplitude, fast reconnection starts earlier and reaches a bigger maximum reconnection rate. We will study the dependence of the maximum reconnection rate on the driving amplitude and other factors. References: [1] G. Lapenta, J. U. Brackbill, and P. Ricci, Phys. Plasmas 13, 055904 (2006) [2] W. Daughton, J. Scudder and H. Karimabadi, Phys. Plasmas 13, 072101 (2006)
DE: 2700 MAGNETOSPHERIC PHYSICS (6939)
DE: 7526 Magnetic reconnection (2723, 7835)
SC: SPA-Magnetospheric Physics [SM]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting