Relativistic tearing and drift-kink instabilities in two-fluid simulations

Abstract

The stability of current sheets in collisionless relativistic pair plasma was studied via two-dimensional two-fluid relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations with vanishing internal friction between fluids. In particular, we investigated the linear growth of the tearing and drift-kink modes in the current sheets both with and without the guide field and obtained the growth rates which are very similar to what has been found in the corresponding particle in cell (PIC) simulations. This suggests that the two-fluid simulations can be useful in studying the large-scale dynamics of astrophysical relativistic plasmas in problems involving magnetic reconnection.