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American Physical Society, Physical Review Letters, 19(106)

DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.106.195003

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New Measure of the Dissipation Region in Collisionless Magnetic Reconnection

Journal article published in 2011 by Seiji Zenitani ORCID, Michael Hesse, Alex Klimas, Masha Kuznetsova
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

A new measure to identify a small-scale dissipation region in collisionless magnetic reconnection is proposed. The energy transfer from the electromagnetic field to plasmas in the electron's rest frame is formulated as a Lorentz-invariant scalar quantity. The measure is tested by two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations in typical configurations: symmetric and asymmetric reconnection, with and without the guide field. The innermost region surrounding the reconnection site is accurately located in all cases. We further discuss implications for nonideal MHD dissipation.