Flux rope formation due to shearing and zipper reconnection

Zipper reconnection has been proposed as a mechanism for creating most of the twist in the flux tubes that are present {prior to} eruptive flares and coronal mass ejections. We have conducted a first numerical experiment on this new regime of reconnection, where two initially untwisted parallel flux tubes are sheared and reconnected to form a large flux rope. We describe the properties of this experiment, including the linkage of magnetic flux between concentrated flux sources at the base of the simulation, the twist of the newly formed flux rope and the conversion of mutual magnetic helicity in the sheared pre-reconnection state into the self-helicity of the newly formed flux rope.

Citation

Threlfall , J , Hood , A W & Priest , E R 2018 , ' Flux rope formation due to shearing and zipper reconnection ' , Solar Physics , vol. 293 , no. 6 , 98 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-018-1318-1

Publication

Solar Physics

Status

Peer reviewed

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-018-1318-1

ISSN

0038-0938

Type

Journal article

Rights

© The Author(s) 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Description

The authors acknowledge the financial support of STFC through the Consolidated grant, ST/N000609/1, to the University of St Andrews. These systems are operated on behalf of the STFC DiRAC HPC Facility (www.dirac.ac.uk). The equipment was funded by BIS National E-infrastructure capital grants (ST/K00042X/1 and ST/K001590/1), STFC capital grants (ST/K00087X/1, ST/H008861/1 and ST/H00887X/1) and DiRAC Operations grants (ST/K003267/1 and ST/K00333X/1). The research data supporting this publication can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.17630/dea50f38-7aff-48c3-b090-c689d02dd305.

Collections

University of St Andrews Research

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14862