Thermally enhanced tearing in solar current sheets: explosive reconnection with plasmoid-trapped condensations

TL;DR

This study investigates how thermal and tearing instabilities in solar current sheets interact to produce explosive magnetic reconnection and plasmoid formation, revealing new conditions for instability growth and plasma condensation.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates that thermal and tearing instabilities reinforce each other at lower resistivities than previously known, leading to explosive reconnection and plasmoid formation in solar current sheets.

Findings

Thermal and tearing instabilities reinforce each other within specific resistivity ranges.

Plasmoid formation occurs at Lundquist numbers between 4.6×10^3 and 2.34×10^5.

Maximum plasmoid numbers scale as S_L^0.223.

Abstract

In flare-relevant current sheets, tearing instability may trigger explosive reconnection and plasmoid formation. We explore how the thermal and tearing modes reinforce each other in the fragmentation of a current sheet in the solar corona through an explosive reconnection process, characterized by the formation of plasmoids which interact and trap condensing plasma. We use a resistive magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulation of a 2D current layer, incorporating the non-adiabatic effects of optically thin radiative energy loss and background heating using \texttt{MPI-AMRVAC}. Our parametric survey explores different resistivities and plasma-$\beta$ to quantify the instability growth rate in the linear and nonlinear regimes. We notice that for dimensionless resistivity values within $10^{-4} - 5 \times 10^{-3}$, we get explosive behavior where thermal instability and tearing behavior reinforce each other. This is clearly below the usual critical Lundquist number range of pure resistive explosive plasmoid formation. The non-linear growth rates follow weak power-law dependency with resistivity. The fragmentation of the current sheet and the formation of the plasmoids in the nonlinear phase of the evolution due to the thermal and tearing instabilities are obtained. The formation of plasmoids is noticed for the Lundquist number ($S_L$) range $4.6 \times 10^3 - 2.34 \times 10^5$. We quantify the temporal variation of the plasmoid numbers and the density filling factor of the plasmoids for different physical conditions. We also find that the maximum plasmoid numbers scale as $S_L^{0.223}$. Within the nonlinearly coalescing plasmoid chains, localized cool condensations gather, realizing density and temperature contrasts similar to coronal rain or prominences.