I Scientific Highlights 007

Magnetic reconnection is a driving engine of solar flares, stellar flares, and quite probably bursty events in high-energy astrophysical sites. The reconnection process is driven by a small-scale “dissipation region” surrounding the reconnection point (X-point), at which a plasma ideal condition breaks down. Recently, kinetic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations have revealed that the electron ideal condition is violated in many locations in collisionless reconnection: i.e., the nonidealness cannot locate the dissipation region. To overcome this problem, we have proposed an electron-frame dissipation measure as a new marker of the dissipation region [1], (1) where γe = [1 − (ve /c)2]−1/2 is the Lorentz factor for the electron bulk velocity and ρc is the charge density. Thi