HR: 17:30h
AN: SM54A-05    [Abstracts]
TI: Occurrence and signatures of the Hall-mediated regimes of magnetic reconnection
AU: * Vekstein, G
EM: g.vekstein@manchester.ac.uk
AF: School of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Manchester, P O Box 88, Manchester, M60 1QD, United Kingdom
AU: Bian, N
EM: n.bian@hotmail.com
AF: School of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Manchester, P O Box 88, Manchester, M60 1QD, United Kingdom
AB: A complete two-fluid description of the resistive tearing instability in a sheared force-free magnetic field is presented. A role of the Hall effect, which accelerates the pace of magnetic reconnection above that achieved in the single-fluid MHD case, is essentially determined by two parameters: the plasma beta, and the normalised ion inertial skin-depth d-i. Altogether, there are four different regimes of reconnection, each of which corresponds to the particular parameters domain in the (beta, d-i) plane. An important signature of the Hall-mediated magnetic reconnection is a quadrupole pattern of the out-of the reconnection plane component of the magnetic field, which has been already observed both in laboratory and space plasmas. Therefore, we also discuss the structure of this field component for all possible regimes of the two-fluid tearing instability.
DE: 2753 Numerical modeling
DE: 7526 Magnetic reconnection (2723, 7835)
DE: 7827 Kinetic and MHD theory
DE: 7835 Magnetic reconnection (2723, 7526)
SC: SPA-Magnetospheric Physics [SM]
MN: 2007 Joint Assembly