SM51A-2545
Magnetic islands formed due to the Kelvin-Helmholz instability in the outflow region of collisionless magnetic reconnection
Friday, 18 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Quanming Lu1, Can Huang1, Fan Guo2, Mingyu Wu1 and Aimin Du3, (1)University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China, (2)Los Alamos National Lab, Los Alamos, NM, United States, (3)Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Abstract:
We carry out large-scale particle-in-cell kinetic simulations to demonstrate that a super-Alfvénic electron shear flow across the current layer can be spontaneously generated in the outflow region of magnetic reconnection, which is unstable to the electron Kelvin-Helmholtz (K-H) instability. The resulted K-H vortex structures continuously drive the secondary magnetic reconnection and formation of secondary magnetic islands, which leads to strong electron energization in the outflow region.
