Chaos-Induced Resistivity in Collisionless Magnetic Reconnection

Abstract

Magnetic null points act as scattering centers where particles describe chaotic orbits and the mixing effect increases the kinetic entropy. In an open system where convection of particles into/from the chaos region exists, the saturation of the entropy can be avoided, and continuous dissipation is achieved. The chaos-induced collisionless resistivity of ions enables fast magnetic reconnection. By matching the microscopic (kinetic process) and the macroscopic parameters of reconnection, we obtain a self-consistent model of the diffusion region.