Influence of the dissipation mechanism on collisionless magnetic reconnection in symmetric and asymmetric current layers

TL;DR

This study investigates how different dissipation mechanisms influence collisionless magnetic reconnection, especially in asymmetric configurations, revealing that the dissipation physics significantly affect the reconnection dynamics in such cases.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid modeling approach to analyze the impact of various dissipation mechanisms on asymmetric collisionless reconnection, highlighting differences from symmetric cases.

Findings

Reconnection properties are robust in symmetric configurations regardless of dissipation.

In asymmetric configurations, the evolution depends strongly on the dissipation mechanism.

The study demonstrates the importance of electron scale physics in asymmetric reconnection dynamics.

Abstract

Numerical studies implementing different versions of the collisionless Ohm's law have shown a reconnection rate insensitive to the nature of the non-ideal mechanism occuring at the X line, as soon as the Hall effect is operating. Consequently, the dissipation mechanism occurring in the vicinity of the reconnection site in collisionless systems is usually thought not to have a dynamical role beyond the violation of the frozen-in condition. The interpretation of recent studies have however led to the opposite conclusion that the electron scale dissipative processes play an important dynamical role in preventing an elongation of the electron layer from throttling the reconnection rate. This work re-visits this topic with a new approach. Instead of focusing on the extensively studied symmetric configuration, we aim to investigate whether the macroscopic properties of collisionless reconnection are affected by the dissipation physics in asymmetric configurations, for which the effect of the Hall physics is substantially modified. because it includes all the physical scales a priori important for collisionless reconnection (Hall and ion kinetic physics) and also because it allows one to change the nature of the non-ideal electron scale physics, we use a 2D hybrid model. The effects of numerical, resistive and hyper-resistive dissipation are studied. In a first part we perform simulations of symmetric reconnection with different non-ideal electron physics. we show that the model captures the already known properties of collisionless reconnection. In a second part, we focus on an asymmetric configuration where the magnetic field strength and the density are both asymmetric. Our results show that contrary to symmetric reconnection, the asymmetric model evolution strongly depends on the nature of the mechanism which breaks the field line connectivity