Magnetic reconnection in Hall-MHD including electron inertia

DANIEL O. GOMEZ; NAHUEL ANDRES; LUIS N. MARTIN; PABLO DMITRUK

Conferencia; American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting 2013; 2013

Magnetic reconnection is an important energy conversion process in highly conducting plasmas, such as those present in the solar corona or in planetary magnetospheres. Within the framework of resistive one-fluid MHD, the Sweet-Parker model leads to extremely low reconnection rates for virtually all space physics applications. Kinetic plasma effects introduce new spatial and temporal scales into the theoretical description, which might significantly increase the reconnection rates. Within the more general framework of two-fluid MHD for a fully ionized hydrogen plasma, we retain the effects of the Hall current and electron inertia. We performed 2.5D Hall MHD simulations including electron inertia using a pseudo-spectral code which yields exact conservation (to round-off errors) of all the ideal invariants. We obtain finite reconnection rates even in the case of zero resistivity, thus showing the important influence of the electron inertia.