Effects of electron inertia in Hall-MHD reconnection

GOMEZ, DANIEL

San Jose dos Campos

Workshop; Parker Workshop on Magnetic Reconnection; 2014

Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciales (INPE)

Magnetic reconnection is an important energy conversion process in highly conducting plasmas, such as those present in the solar corona or in planetary magnetospheres.Even though one-fluid magnetohydrodynamics provides the general framework for a theoretical description of reconnection, kinetic plasma effects introduce new spatial and temporal scales, 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.