Secondary instabilities and vortex formation in collisionless-fluid magnetic reconnection.
It is shown that the pattern of current layers formed within a magnetic island in the nonlinear phase of magnetic field line reconnection in a collisionless two-dimensional fluid plasma is subject to the onset of a secondary instability, the effect of which increases with decreasing electron temperature. In the cold electron limit the saturation of the island growth is accompanied by a turbulent redistribution of the current layers and by the development of long lived fluid vortices while, in the opposite limit, the current layer structure remains regular.
Del Sarto
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Physics Department, University of Pisa and INFM, Pisa, Italy.
Califano
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Pegoraro
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