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Updated: Jul 17, 2025

Non-equilibrium Microwave Plasma for Efficient High Temperature Chemistry
Published on: August 1, 2017
Extended Magnetic Reconnection in Kinetic Plasma Turbulence
Tak Chu Li1, Yi-Hsin Liu1, Yi Qi2
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755, USA.
Abstract:
Magnetic reconnection and plasma turbulence are ubiquitous processes important for laboratory, space, and astrophysical plasmas. Reconnection has been suggested to play an important role in the energetics and dynamics of turbulence by observations, simulations, and theory for two decades. The fundamental properties of reconnection at kinetic scales, essential to understanding the general problem of reconnection in magnetized turbulence, remain largely unknown at present. Here, we present an application of the magnetic flux transport method that can accurately identify reconnection in turbulence to a three-dimensional simulation. Contrary to ideas that reconnection in turbulence would be patchy and unpredictable, highly extended reconnection X lines, on the same order of magnitude as the system size, form at kinetic scales. Extended X lines develop through bidirectional reconnection spreading. They satisfy critical balance characteristic of turbulence, which predicts the X-line extent at a given scale. These results present a picture of fundamentally extended reconnection in kinetic-scale turbulence.
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