Secondary instabilities and vortex formation in collisionless-fluid magnetic reconnection

Phys Rev Lett. 2003 Dec 5;91(23):235001. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.91.235001. Epub 2003 Dec 2.

Abstract

It is shown that the pattern of current layers formed within a magnetic island in the nonlinear phase of magnetic field line reconnection in a collisionless two-dimensional fluid plasma is subject to the onset of a secondary instability, the effect of which increases with decreasing electron temperature. In the cold electron limit the saturation of the island growth is accompanied by a turbulent redistribution of the current layers and by the development of long lived fluid vortices while, in the opposite limit, the current layer structure remains regular.