Instability of current sheets and formation of plasmoid chains

Mar, 2007
4 pages
Published in:
  • Phys.Plasmas 14 (2007) 100703
e-Print:

Citations per year

20072012201720222025051015
Abstract: (arXiv)
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} L/v_A, 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}.