Fast magnetic reconnection in the strong guide-field regime

To explain many magnetised plasma phenomena in nature and the laboratory, it is important to understand how the rates of magnetic reconnection behave in large and weakly collisional systems. Here we show for the large guide field regime, which is pertinent to tokamaks and the solar corona, that reconnection can be fast and independent of both collisional dissipation and system-size regardless of the relative sizes of the ratio of plasma pressure to magnetic pressure and the electron-to-ion mass ratio. We present results from a discrete analysis of the dissipation region, which illustrates how this region adjusts to permit rates independent of the magnitude of dissipation. Finally, we compare a reduced two-field reconnection model with fully kinetic Particle-In-Cell simulations to demonstrate that this model is adequate to reproduce the rates and evolution of the equivalent fully kinetic system in the strong guide-field regime.