Revisiting the Growth Rate of the Relativistic Tearing Instability: The Role of the Non-ideal MHD Structure

Abstract

Magnetic reconnection in magnetically dominated pair plasmas is a key process in high-energy astrophysical systems. We revisit the relativistic tearing instability in a Harris current sheet and derive an improved analytical expression for its linear growth rate and the most unstable wavenumber. The key modification is the treatment of the vector potential perturbation in the non-ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) region. Instead of the conventional constant-A approximation, we use an extrapolated-A approximation, in which the ideal-MHD solution is linearly extrapolated into the non-ideal region. Comparison with two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations shows that the revised theory improves the prediction of the most unstable wavenumber. The improvement is most pronounced at low particle drift velocities, where the particle gyroradius is smaller than the current-sheet thickness and the fastest-growing mode shifts to longer wavelength. The resulting analytical expressions provide an updated benchmark for magnetically dominated reconnection and its applications to high-energy astrophysical plasmas, including gamma-ray bursts and fast radio bursts.