Illustrated Physics
physics, drawn
Concept

Magnetic reconnection — where it appears

The breaking and rejoining of magnetic field lines in a thin region where a plasma's conductivity locally fails. It converts magnetic energy into heat and fast flows, powers solar flares, and is what lets a relaxing plasma shed energy while keeping its total helicity.

Named by 2 essays across one field — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

The field near a neutral point. Field lines near a magnetic null, traced by following the local field direction rather than plotted from the closed form. The field is B ∝ (y, k²x) with k = 1, whose lines are the hyperbolae y² − k²x² = constant and whose separatrices are the straight lines y = ±1x. At k = 1 the X is symmetric and the current density is exactly zero: the field is curl-free, and nothing is stored in it beyond the field itself. The four quadrants are four separate flux systems, and which of them a given line belongs to is the quantity a frozen-in field is not allowed to alter.

The knot the field cannot untie

A perfectly conducting fluid cannot change which field line joins which piece of it. So two flux systems pushed together may be squashed indefinitely and can never merge, and the energy of the squashing accumulates with nowhere to go. The release happens only where the perfect conductivity locally fails — in a sheet three metres thick inside a structure ten thousand kilometres across — and the rate that follows is a hundred thousand times too slow for the flares that are observed.

astrophysics · Flux freezing The field a pinch gives up relaxing into. The axial and azimuthal field across a cylinder of conducting plasma in the minimum-energy state at fixed helicity, Bz = J₀(λr) and Bθ = J₁(λr), drawn for λa = 1.5 and λa = 3. Solid lines are the axial field and dashed lines the azimuthal field. Both satisfy ∇×B = λB, checked by finite differences at three radii, so the current runs along the field everywhere and the field exerts no force on the plasma. At λa = 3 the axial field passes through zero at r = 0.802a and is reversed outside it. The reversal needs λa above 2.405, the first zero of J₀, and nothing was imposed at the edge to produce it. λa = 1.5: pinch parameter Θ = 0.75, reversal parameter F = 0.688. λa = 3: pinch parameter Θ = 1.50, reversal parameter F = -1.150.

The twist that outlives the turbulence

A plasma pinch driven hard enough goes violently unstable, and then settles into the same quiet state however it was started — with the field at its edge pointing backwards. The explanation is that turbulence destroys almost every constraint a perfect conductor obeys and spares one. The magnetic helicity, a measure of how twisted and linked the field is, decays far more slowly than the energy, and a field that has shed all the energy it can at fixed helicity has only one shape available to it.

astrophysics · Flux freezing

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

DissipationFlux freezingMagnetic energyPlasmaResistivityConductivityCurrent sheetEquilibriumForce-free fieldInstabilityMagnetic fluxMagnetic helicity

All concepts