Low-Beta MHD Reconnection As a Showcase of Compressible Fluid Dynamics

In the solar corona, in the magnetosphere, and in other astrophysical settings, magnetic reconnection often occurs in a low-beta plasma. Unfortunately, less is known about low-beta reconnection, partially due to lack of attention and partially due to numerical difficulties. Recent MHD simulations revealed several new features of low-beta reconnection; For example, Zenitani et al.(2010,2011) [1,2] discovered a normal shock which is perpendicular to the Petschek shock and a repeated shock-reflection in front of a magnetic island.

In this contribution, we extend earlier works with improved MHD codes and organize the results from the perspective of compressible fluid dynamics. In fluid dynamics, once a flow speed becomes comparable with the local sound speed, various compressible effects take place. This is the case for low-beta reconnection, because an Alfvenic reconnection jet becomes supersonic. Many phenomena can be understood as compressible fluid effects: the normal shock is equivalent to a recompression shock on a transonic airfoil, the shock-reflection corresponds to shock-diamonds in an over-expanded supersonic flow, the adiabatic acceleration similarly takes place as the Laval nozzle, and so on. They appear regardless of Sweet-Parker, plasmoid-mediated, or Petschek reconnections.

We further discover another shock-diamonds in extreme cases. A critical condition for these hidden shocks is derived. All these issues can be applied to more extreme cases of relativistic reconnection, in which the sound speed is ``relatively'' slow. We will also address the relevance to the physics of extragalactic jets.

References:
[1] Zenitani, Hesse, & Klimas, ApJ, 716, L214 (2010).
[2] Zenitani and Miyoshi, Phys. Plasmas, 18, 022105 (2011).