American Physical Society, Physical Review Letters, 20(101)
DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.101.205004
Full text: Download
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