Instability of current sheets and formation of plasmoid chains
Abstract
Current sheets formed in magnetic reconnection events are found to be unstable to high-wavenumber perturbations. The instability is very fast: its maximum growth rate scales as S1/4 vA/L, where L is the length of the sheet, vA the Alfven speed and S the Lundquist number. As a result, a chain of plasmoids (secondary islands) is formed, whose number scales as S3/8.
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