Turbulent Plasmoid Reconnection

TL;DR

This paper investigates how small-scale turbulence influences large-scale magnetic reconnection in plasmoid-unstable current sheets using a subgrid-scale turbulence model in MHD simulations, revealing turbulence's complex role in reconnection rates.

Contribution

It introduces and verifies a subgrid-scale turbulence model to study turbulence effects on plasmoid reconnection, highlighting the impact of turbulence on reconnection dynamics.

Findings

Turbulence affects the growth of plasmoid instability.

Turbulent helicity reduces turbulent resistivity.

Guide field asymmetry influences reconnection rate.

Abstract

The plasmoid instability may lead to fast magnetic reconnection through long current sheets(CS). It is well known that large-Reynolds-number plasmas easily become turbulent. We address the question whether turbulence enhances the energy conversion rate of plasmoid-unstable current sheets. We carry out appropriate numerical MHD simulations, but resolving simultaneously the relevant large-scale (mean-) fields and the corresponding small-scale, turbulent, quantities by means of direct numerical simulations (DNS) is not possible. Hence we investigate the influence of small scale turbulence on large scale MHD processes by utilizing a subgrid-scale (SGS) turbulence model. We verify the applicability of our SGS model and then use it to investigate the influence of turbulence on the plasmoid instability. We start the simulations with Harris-type and force-free CS equilibria in the presence of a finite guide field in the direction perpendicular to the reconnection plane. We use the DNS results to investigate the growth of the plasmoid instability. The energy and cross-helicity due to turbulence are obtained in terms of the mean fields by a Gaussian filtering formulation from a Reynolds averaging turbulence model. The influence of turbulence on the reconnection rate of the plasmoid instability is investigated. To verify the predictions of the SGS-model, the electromotive force (${\bf\cal{E}}$) is calculated for the coarse data obtained by filtering and compared to the SGS-model. The symmetry breakage with respect to the guide field direction causes a turbulent helicity which reduces the influence of the apparent turbulent resistivity. The reduced reconnection rate of guide field plasmoid reconnection is attributed to a balancing between the different physical effects related to turbulence.