Fast compression of a current sheet during externally driven magnetic reconnection

Abstract

Magnetic reconnection of two toroidal plasmas with arbitrary q values revealed a dependence of sheet-current dissipation and ion heating on ion-gyromotion. Effective sheet-current resistivity was found to increase significantly, when an external force compressed the current sheet shorter than the ion-gyroradius, and both the reconnection speed and ion temperature increased with decreasing current sheet width and with increasing ion-gyroradius.