Magnetic Reconnection near the Dreicer Limit

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The Principal Investigator (PI) will perform a comprehensive theoretical study of the poorly explored and important regime of weakly collisional reconnection in plasmas, where Coulomb collisions play a role, but where reconnection electric fields are comparable to, or larger than, the Dreicer limit for runaway electrons. These results will have direct scientific application to describing reconnection processes in the solar corona and transition region. The PI intends to quantify the practical consequences of such reconnection, such as bulk plasma heating and particle acceleration, using self-consistent modeling and state-of-the-art, fully kinetic, particle-in-cell simulations with a Monte-Carlo treatment of the Coulomb collisions, in order to provide a first-principles description of the relevant physics. The PI notes that this research will have widespread applications in a variety of sub-fields of plasma physics. This project's educational objectives include the training of a postdoctoral researcher in reconnection physics, petascale computing, and scientific visualization. In addition, the PI's employer, SciberQuest, Inc., has an ongoing partnership with the San Diego Supercomputer Center's internship program entitled "Research Experience for High School Students" (REHS). As part of this project, the PI will mentor two students per year through the REHS program.