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Updated: Mar 18, 2026

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
Experimental Demonstration of the Collisionless Plasmoid Instability below the Ion Kinetic Scale during Magnetic
J Olson1, J Egedal1, S Greess1
1Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1150 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA.
Abstract:
The spontaneous formation of magnetic islands is observed in driven, antiparallel magnetic reconnection on the Terrestrial Reconnection Experiment. We here provide direct experimental evidence that the plasmoid instability is active at the electron scale inside the ion diffusion region in a low collisional regime. The experiments show the island formation occurs at a smaller system size than predicted by extended magnetohydrodynamics or fully collisionless simulations. This more effective seeding of magnetic islands emphasizes their importance to reconnection in naturally occurring 3D plasmas.
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