Reconnection of Magnetic Flux Tubes

Magnetic reconnection plays an important role in energy release in solar, magnetospheric, and laboratory plasmas. However, this reconnection is usually three dimensional, and so quite difficult both to study and to conceptualize. Dividing three dimensional magnetic fields up into flux tubes and studying how individual pairs of flux tubes reconnect provides a way to make the reconnection dynamics more tractable. We will present a review of the current understanding, both from theory and from simulation, of flux tube reconnection. We will also present a brief introduction of the implications this reconnection has for understanding flux tube dynamics in space and laboratory plasmas.