Magnetic Reconnection with Gkeyll
Computational lectures on Sweet–Parker and fast reconnection
Overview
These are two self-contained computational lectures on magnetic reconnection. Rather than deriving reconnection rates on paper alone, we test the classic theory directly against nonlinear multi-fluid simulations of the GEM reconnection challenge (Birn et al. 2001), run with Gkeyll and analyzed with postgkyl.
- Lecture 1: Sweet–Parker scaling in multi-fluid simulations
- Reproduce the conservation arguments of Sweet–Parker theory, mass and energy conservation through the current sheet, from a resistive five-moment simulation.
- Lecture 2: What makes reconnection fast?
- Measure the reconnection rate, compare it with the Sweet–Parker prediction, and use an Ohm’s law analysis of five- and ten-moment simulations to find what makes reconnection fast.
How to use these lectures
You can read the lectures here, with all figures included. To work through them yourself:
- Install Gkeyll and postgkyl on your laptop.
- Run the two simulations the lectures analyze.
- Open the lecture notebooks in marimo and work through them with your own data.
The lecture notebooks are plain Python files in the notebooks/ folder, and the simulation input files are in inputs/.
Prerequisites
The lectures assume familiarity with the Sweet–Parker model of reconnection and with the basics of Python and NumPy. No prior experience with Gkeyll is needed.