Dartmouth Events

Abstract: Recent discovery of electron-only reconnection has prompted numerous studies of the small-scale reconnection phenomenon in various regions of the Earth’s magnetosphere. However, the origin and the criteria that governs the physics of electron-only reconnection is still not well understood. I present an overview of recent numerical, observational, and theoretical findings on the electron-only magnetic reconnection process in 2D and 3D settings. In 3D, we find that the finite length X-line configuration further enhances the reconnection rate due the magnetic tension force activated in the out-of-plane direction of the usual reconnection plane. A brief discussion of recent observations of large-scale reconnection in PSP and preliminary comparative simulation analysis will be presented as well.