1. NUMERICAL EXPERIMENTS ON THE DETAILED ENERGY CONVERSION AND SPECTRUM STUDIES IN A CORONA CURRENT SHEET.
- Author
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Lei Ni, Jun Lin, Zhixing Mei, and Yan Li
- Subjects
SOLAR spectra ,ENERGY conversion ,NUMERICAL analysis ,COMPUTER simulation ,HEAT storage ,PLASMA density - Abstract
In this paper, we study the energy conversion and spectra in a corona current sheet (CS) by 2.5 dimensional MHD numerical simulations. Numerical results show that many Petschek-like fine structures with slow-mode shocks mediated by plasmoid instabilities develop during the magnetic reconnection process. The termination shocks can also be formed above the primary magnetic island and at the head of secondary islands. These shocks play important roles in generating thermal energy in a corona CS. For a numerical simulation with initial conditions close to the solar corona environment, the ratio of the generated thermal energy to the total dissipated magnetic energy is around 1/5 before secondary islands appear. After secondary islands appear, the generated thermal energy starts to increase sharply and this ratio can reach a value of about 3/5. In an environment with a relatively lower plasma density and plasma β, the plasma can be heated to a much higher temperature. After secondary islands appear, the one-dimensional energy spectra along the CS do not behave as a simple power law and the spectrum index increases with the wave number. The average spectrum index for the magnetic energy spectrum along the CS is about 1.8. The two-dimensional spectra intuitively show that part of the high energy is cascaded to large kx and ky space after secondary islands appear. The plasmoid distribution function calculated from numerical simulations behaves as a power law closer to in the intermediate ψ regime. By using the effective magnetic diffusivity is estimated to be about 10
11 ∼ 1012 m2 s−1 . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]- Published
- 2015
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