Turbulent Magnetic Reconnection in Two Dimensions (2009)
Loureiro, N. F., Uzdensky, D. A., Schekochihin, A. A., Cowley, S. C., Yousef, T. A.
Two-dimensional numerical simulations of the effect of background turbulence on 2D resistive magnetic reconnection are presented. For sufficiently small values of the resistivity ($\eta$) and...
Formation of Plasmoid Chains in Magnetic Reconnection (2009)
Samtaney, R., Loureiro, N. F., Uzdensky, D. A., Schekochihin, A. A., Cowley, S. C.
A detailed numerical study of magnetic reconnection in resistive MHD for very large, previously inaccessible, Lundquist numbers ($10^4\le S\le 10^8$) is reported. Large-aspect-ratio Sweet-Parker...
Effect of current corrugations on the stability of the tearing mode (2009)
Militello, F., Romanelli, M., Hastie, R. J., Loureiro, N. F.
The generation of zonal magnetic fields in laboratory fusion plasmas is predicted by theoretical and numerical models and was recently observed experimentally. It is shown that the modification of...
Influence of higher-order harmonics on the saturation of the tearing mode (2008)
Arcis, N., Loureiro, N. F., Militello, F.
The nonlinear saturation of the tearing mode is revisited in slab geometry by taking into account higher-order harmonics in the outer solution. The general formalism for tackling this problem in the...
An iterative semi-implicit scheme with robust damping (2007)
Loureiro, N. F., Hammett, G. W.
An efficient, iterative semi-implicit (SI) numerical method for the time integration of stiff wave systems is presented. Physics-based assumptions are used to derive a convergent iterative...
Instability of current sheets and formation of plasmoid chains (2007)
Loureiro, N. F., Schekochihin, A. A., Cowley, S. C.
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 S^{1/4} v_A/L, where L...
X-point collapse and saturation in the nonlinear tearing mode reconnection (2005)
Loureiro, N. F., Cowley, S. C., Dorland, W. D., Haines, M. G., Schekochihin, A. A.
We study the nonlinear evolution of the resistive tearing mode in slab geometry in two dimensions. We show that, in the strongly driven regime (large Delta'), a collapse of the X-point occurs once...
Fast and slow nonlinear tearing mode reconnection (2004)
Loureiro, N. F., Cowley, S. C., Dorland, W. D., Haines, M. G., Schekochihin, A. A.
This is a brief account of our numerical study of the tearing mode reconnection. We demonstrate two main points. First, we show that, given sufficiently small resistivity, the Rutherford regime...