Onset of Secondary Instabilities and Plasma Heating during Magnetic Reconnection in Strongly Magnetized Regions of the Low Solar Atmosphere

Abstract

We numerically study magnetic reconnection on different spatial scales and at different heights in the weakly ionized plasma of the low solar atmosphere (around 300–800 km above the solar surface) within a reactive 2.5D multifluid plasma–neutral model. We consider a strongly magnetized plasma ( β  ∼ 6%) evolving from a force-free magnetic configuration and perturbed to initialize formation of a reconnection current sheet. On large scales, the resulting current sheets are observed to undergo a secondary “plasmoid” instability. A series of simulations at different scales demonstrates a cascading current sheet formation process that terminates for current sheets with width of  2 m and length of ∼100 m, corresponding to the critical current sheet aspect ratio of ∼50. We also observe that the plasmoid instability is the primary physical mechanism accelerating the magnetic reconnection in this plasma parameter regime. After plasmoid instabilities appear, the reconnection rate sharply increases to a value of ∼0.035, observed to be independent of the Lundquist number. These characteristics are very similar to magnetic reconnection in fully ionized plasmas. In this low- β guide-field reconnection regime, both the recombination and collisionless effects are observed to have a small contribution to the reconnection rate. The simulations show that it is difficult to heat the dense weakly ionized photospheric plasmas to above 2 × 10 4 K during the magnetic reconnection process. However, the plasmas in the low solar chromosphere can be heated above 3 × 10 4 K with reconnection magnetic fields of 500 G or stronger.