Seminar: Onset conditions and mechanisms triggering magnetic reconnection

Understanding when magnetic reconnection triggers is of great importance to a wide variety of plasma fields and communities. For example, it will improve our understanding of space weather, solar dynamics, Earth’s magnetosphere, energy transport and plasma heating, and magnetic confinement in fusion devices. How magnetic reconnection initiates is, due to observational challenges, a long-standing issue. In-situ observations indicate that thin current sheets are a key requirement for reconnection to start, but they also reveal that reconnection occurs only in a fraction of such current sheets in Earth’s magnetosphere and the solar wind. Here, we propose a statistical approach to first understand what conditions favour reconnection by classifying current sheets as reconnecting or non-reconnecting.