The magnetospheric cusp is a funnel-shaped region where shocked solar wind plasma is able to enter the high-latitude magnetosphere via the process of magnetic reconnection. The plasma observations include various cusp signatures such as ion energy dispersions and diamagnetic effects. We present an overview analysis of cusp plasma observations at the Saturnian magnetosphere from the Cassini spac...

[1] We trace the formation and subsequent motion of a transpolar arc in response to dayside and nightside reconnection. Both highand low-latitude dayside reconnection are observed, as well as periods of substorm and nonsubstorm nightside reconnection, during the 7-hour interval of interest on 19 January 2002. We speculate that the arc is formed by a burst of nonsubstorm nightside reconnection a...

The importance of magnetic reconnection as an energy release mechanism in many solar, stellar, magnetospheric and astrophysical phenomena has long been recognised. Reconnection is the only mechanism by which magnetic fields can globally restructure, enabling them to access a lower energy state. Over the past decade, there have been some major advances in our understanding of threedimensional re...

We report on the first analysis of magnetospheric cusp observations at Saturn by multiple in situ instruments onboard the Cassini spacecraft. Using this we infer the process of reconnection was occurring at Saturn's magnetopause. This agrees with remote observations that showed the associated auroral signatures of reconnection. Cassini crossed the northern cusp around noon local time along a po...

In this paper, we develop a lattice Boltzmann model for relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). Even though the model is derived for resistive MHD, it is shown that it is numerically robust even in the high conductivity (ideal MHD) limit. In order to validate the numerical method, test simulations are carried out for both ideal and resistive limits, namely the propagation of Alfvén waves in th...

We report a phase transition model for the onset of fast magnetic reconnection. By investigating the joint dynamics of streaming instability (i.e., current driven ion acoustic in this paper) and current gradient driven whistler wave prior to the onset of fast reconnection, we show that the nonlinear evolution of current sheet (CS) can be described by a Landau-Ginzburg equation. The phase transi...

Gluon jets with a large gap in the rapidity distribution of particles within the jet are very sensitive to color reconnection effects. Gluon jets of this type, selected from hadronic Z decay events produced in ee annihilations at LEP, are used to test three QCD models which include a simulation of color reconnection: one in the Ariadne Monte Carlo, one in the Herwig Monte Carlo, and the other b...

A two-dimensional, two-fluid model is used to investigate driven magnetic reconnection in collisionless or semicollisional plasmas. The reconnection is driven by externally induced plasma flows in a background magnetic configuration that has a hyperbolic null component in the reconnection plane and a strong component, the so-called guide component, perpendicular to that plane. A dynamic solutio...

The coupling between the global reconnection geometry and the local microphysics, caused by the Hall effect, is studied during counterhelicity plasma merging in the magnetic reconnection experiment. The structure of the reconnection layer is significantly modified by reversing the sign of the toroidal fields, which affects the manifestation of the Hall effect in the collisionless regime. The lo...

Two-dimensional numerical simulations of the effect of background turbulence on 2D resistive magnetic reconnection are presented. For sufficiently small values of the resistivity (η) and moderate values of the turbulent power ( ), the reconnection rate is found to have a much weaker dependence on η than the Sweet-Parker scaling of η and is even consistent with an η-independent value. For a give...