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American Physical Society, Physical Review Letters, 20(101)

DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.101.205004

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Magnetic Reconnection by a Self-RetreatingXLine

Journal article published in 2008 by M. Oka, M. Fujimoto, T. K. M. Nakamura ORCID, I. Shinohara, K.-I. Nishikawa
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Preprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
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Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of collisionless magnetic reconnection are performed to study asymmetric reconnection in which an outflow is blocked by a hard wall while leaving sufficiently large room for the outflow of the opposite direction. This condition leads to a slow, roughly constant motion of the diffusion region away from the wall, the so-called `X-line retreat'. The typical retreat speed is ~0.1 times the Alfven speed. At the diffusion region, ion flow pattern shows strong asymmetry and the ion stagnation point and the X-line are not collocated. A surprise, however, is that the reconnection rate remains the same unaffected by the retreat motion. ; Comment: 4 pages; Phys. Rev. Lett., in press