Flow’s influence on the resistive tearing instability
Date:
Contributed talk at WISA 2023, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom.
Abstract. In recent years, magnetic reconnection has risen to the forefront of plasma research of the Sun due to its key role in the evolution of eruptive events in the solar corona. As it stands, the major question to answer is why observed reconnection rates are so much higher than models account for. As a form of spontaneous reconnection, the resistive tearing instability has garnered renewed interest since its discovery 60 years ago.
Exploiting the low computational cost of the spectroscopic Legolas code, tearing growth rates are investigated in compressible conditions in the presence of background flow and optionally, viscosity. For slab configurations such as the Harris current sheet, it is found that flow can both enhance and stabilise the tearing mode, in clearly separated regions of the parameter space, with the magnitude of its effect depending on the configuration parameters. Additionally, the analytic power laws of the growth rate scaling with resistivity are challenged by the addition of compressibility, flow, and viscosity, with suppression of the tearing mode above a critical speed-dependent resistivity.