Two-dimensional MHD Simulations of Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection

N. Watanabe, T. Yokoyama

Magnetic reconnection is widely recognized as a very important phenomenon
in many laboratory and astrophysical plasmas. Historically, reconnection
was of interest mostly to space physicists studying the solar corona and
the Earth's magnetosphere and to researchers in magnetic confinement
fusion. Over the last decade, it has been recognized that magnetic
reconnection process is also of great importance in high-energy
astrophysics. However, there are few theoretical studies about it. On the
other hand, there are several MHD simulation studies for various
high-energy phenomena, and relativistic MHD codes are developed. All these
codes, however, are applied to ideal MHD, and there is no study of
relativistic MHD simulation for phenomena like magnetic reconnection
processes to take account of resistivity. Our purpose is to investigate
relativistic effects of magnetic reconnection to apply for high-energy
phenomena in future. For that, we develop a new two-dimensional
relativistic MHD code which takes account of resistivity, and carry out
numerical simulations of magnetic reconnection. With some cases of
calculations, we find out outflow velocity reaches Alfvén velocity
of the lobe, and when Alfvén velocity of the lobe is large, we
obtain high reconnection rate.