| Name: | Arghyadeep Paul |
| Affiliation: | Indian Institute of Technology Indore |
| Conference ID : | ASI2022_339 |
| Title : | Magnetic Reconnection and Particle Acceleration in Highly Elongated Current Sheets: A Coronal and Magnetospheric Perspective |
| Authors : | Arghyadeep Paul, Bhargav Vaidya |
| Abstract Type: | Poster |
| Abstract Category : | Sun and the Solar System |
| Abstract : | Magnetic reconnection is a ubiquitous phenomenon in plasmas and is an essential process of energy conversion and particle acceleration. Reconnection is prevalent in the solar corona and turbulent regions where multiple current sheets exist close to each other is common. Such current sheets are often also accompanied by the presence of a parallel velocity shear. Reconnection is also attributed to be the key process responsible for mass and energy transfer from the solar wind to the earth's magnetospheric system. We have investigated the evolution of a plasmoid dominated double current sheet system exhibiting an explosive reconnection phase in the presence of a parallel shear flow using resistive magnetohydrodynamic simulations in a 2D slab geometry and have explored the mechanisms of particle acceleration and their dependence on the shear flow in such rapidly evolving systems. Our results show a deviation in the reconnection rate from the theoretical scaling and the same is found to be dependent on the structure of the magnetic islands past the early evolution stage. The results from our test particle simulations also demonstrate the effects of various mechanisms such as magnetic island merger and island contraction in the acceleration of particles in a manner to produce a power-law spectrum of the non thermal population of accelerated particles. Furthermore, as an extension of the study to more realistic and complex environments, we perform 3D global MHD simulations with adaptive mesh refinement(AMR) to study the formation, evolution and large scale effects of flux rope structures produced due to bursty magnetic reconnection at the dayside magnetopause of an Earth like planet. Such flux transfer events or FTEs are the 3 Dimensional equivalent of plasmoids being complex in structure and are responsible for the impulsive injection of large amounts of mass and energy into the planet's magnetospheric system. |