Numerical Simulations of Turbulent MHD Reconnection

Magnetic reconnection is a very important process in a large number of laboratory, space, and astrophysical plasmas. It is usually believed that in the resistive MHD regime, the reconnection rate obeys the classical Sweet-Parker scaling, proportional to the square root of the resistivity, and is thus very slow. Whether reconnection can be significantly accelerated in the presence of MHD turbulence\footnote {A.~Lazarian \& E.~Vishniac, ApJ, 517, 700 (1999).} is still an unresolved question. In this study, we use high-resolution incompressible resistive magnetohydrodynamic numerical simulations to investigate the effect of externally imposed small-scale turbulence on the reconnection of a large-scale magnetic field. We characterize the turbulent enhancement of the reconnection rate over the laminar Sweet-Parker rate as a function of the resistivity, turbulent driving scale and amplitude.