4.3 Article

Reconnection studies under different types of turbulence driving

Journal

NONLINEAR PROCESSES IN GEOPHYSICS
Volume 19, Issue 2, Pages 297-314

Publisher

COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH
DOI: 10.5194/npg-19-297-2012

Keywords

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Funding

  1. FAPESP [2009/50053-8]
  2. Center for Magnetic Self-Organization in Laboratory and Astrophysical Plasmas, NSF [AST-08-08118]
  3. NASA [NNX09AH78G]
  4. National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada
  5. Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education [92/N-ASTROSIM/2008/0, 3033/B/H03/2008/35]
  6. National Science Foundation [TG-AST080005N]

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We study a model of fast magnetic reconnection in the presence of weak turbulence proposed by Lazarian and Vishniac (1999) using three-dimensional direct numerical simulations. The model has been already successfully tested in Kowal et al. (2009) confirming the dependencies of the reconnection speed V-rec on the turbulence injection power P-inj and the injection scale l(inj) expressed by a constraint V-rec similar to P(inj)(1/2)l(inj)(3/4)and no observed dependency on Ohmic resistivity. In Kowal et al. (2009), in order to drive turbulence, we injected velocity fluctuations in Fourier space with frequencies concentrated around k(inj) = 1/l(inj), as described in Alvelius (1999). In this paper, we extend our previous studies by comparing fast magnetic reconnection under different mechanisms of turbulence injection by introducing a new way of turbulence driving. The new method injects velocity or magnetic eddies with a specified amplitude and scale in random locations directly in real space. We provide exact relations between the eddy parameters and turbulent power and injection scale. We performed simulations with new forcing in order to study turbulent power and injection scale dependencies. The results show no discrepancy between models with two different methods of turbulence driving exposing the same scalings in both cases. This is in agreement with the Lazarian and Vishniac (1999) predictions. In addition, we performed a series of models with varying viscosity nu. Although Lazarian and Vishniac (1999) do not provide any prediction for this dependence, we report a weak relation between the reconnection speed with viscosity, V-rec similar to nu(-1/4).

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