MAGNETIC RECONNECTION: RECURSIVE CURRENT SHEET COLLAPSE TRIGGERED BY IDEAL TEARING

We study, by means of MHD simulations, the onset and evolution of fast reconnection via the ideal tearing mode within a collapsing current sheet at high Lundquist numbers (S >> 10(4)). We first confirm that as the collapse proceeds, fast reconnection is triggered well before a Sweet-Parker-type configuration can form: during the linear stage, plasmoids rapidly grow in a few Alfven times when the predicted ideal tearing threshold S-1/3 is approached from above; after the linear phase of the initial instability, X-points collapse and reform nonlinearly. We show that these give rise to a hierarchy of tearing events repeating faster and faster on current sheets at ever smaller scales, corresponding to the triggering of ideal tearing at the renormalized Lundquist number. In resistive MHD, this process should end with the formation of sub-critical (S <= 10(4)) Sweet-Parker sheets at microscopic scales. We present a simple model describing the nonlinear recursive evolution that explains the timescale of the disruption of the initial sheet.