Totally wrong.
You need to actually read stuff.
There are some nice pictures of the currents induced by magnetic reconnection in colliding plasmas. For example the first caption contains
"The "sparkles" are the incduced electric field calculated from -dA/dt. Note that the incuced field is largest in the reconnection region at the center of the image." - note the electric fields are "incduced" (induced).
First asked 11 January 2010
brantc:
- What is your complete description of magnetic reconnection?
It seems to be something like electric currents create the magnetic fields that then reconnect. That is really vague.
- Where is the experimental evidence for your description?
Cite the published papers not pretty pictures that seem to disprove your description.
ETA:
Three-dimensional current systems generated by plasmas colliding in a background magnetoplasma.
Here is a guy that works at LAPD.
"Inside LaPD, at a separation distance of roughly 10cm, are suspended a pair of carbon (graphite) cylinders (2cm x 20cm). During the discharge, the two inside faces are illuminated by the pulse from two 10ns, 1.1J Nd:YAG lasers, at an angle normal to the background field. Two dense (initial n ≈ 1015) plasmas form and propagate across the background field, colliding.
As in previous laser experiments at LaPD, the
electron currents generated by the expanding laser plasmas create Alfven waves in the background plasma. The presence of
two such current channels in this experiment leads to reconnection phenomena which is the subject of our recent publication in Physics of Plasmas. "
http://alfven.org/science.php
From that paper.
"EXPERIMENTS on the dense laser-produced plasmas (lpp) expanding into a background magnetoplasma trigger a rich variety of phenomena including the formation of magnetic bubbles [1] and the generation of Alfvén waves [2], [3].
The lpp emit streams of field-aligned electrons, which, in turn, generate return currents in the background plasma. Within several microseconds, these become the current systems of shear Alfvén waves.
The currents merge and split in space and time and are peppered with regions in which magnetic fields that point in opposite directions are forced together. The data indicate that they are likely the sites of magnetic field-line reconnection."
Here is the complete paper.
Visualizing Three-Dimensional Reconnection in a
Colliding Laser Plasma Experiment.
http://alfven.org/media/POP-colliding-plasmas.pdf
Look at the experimental setup. It is 2 electrodes that generate a stream of electrons(like the experimental setup from the other facility). The electrical current(stream of electrons) creates a pair of flux tubes(as shown by the data) which then merge and are the likely sites of reconnection.
If you took the time to understand the
requirements for reconnection you would see that all these experiments use the same methodology.
My reconnection Hypotheses.
The reason for the formation of flux tubes(in the laboratory) is to equalize the potential between two separated regions of charge(sets of electrodes). This means they carry an electric current, or kinetic energy(eV).
When the plasma cannot carry enough current due to its "density", a flux tube forms that allows equalization on a much faster time scale.
This formation usually has the characteristic of being a dual tube helix. Under other situations the number of tubes can expand to some other even number up to an observed 52 filaments.
In the dual filament case the filaments are governed by the Biot-Savart law. This is in turn governed by the gyro-radius of the charges in the plasma filaments.
If a disturbance or a change in the feed current happens this changes the gyro radius of the particles which leads to changes in the magnetic force between the filaments.
Extreme case is when the filaments merge or reconnect. This produces either a z-pinch filament between the 2 filaments or a double layer that accelerates particles producing a jets of electrons in one direction and proton in the other direction.
It already has been tested many times.
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