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Distribution Of Plasmoids In Post-Coronal Mass Ejection Current Sheets, L.-J. Guo, A. Bhattacharjee, Y.-M. Huang
Distribution Of Plasmoids In Post-Coronal Mass Ejection Current Sheets, L.-J. Guo, A. Bhattacharjee, Y.-M. Huang
Dartmouth Scholarship
Recently, the fragmentation of a current sheet in the high-Lundquist-number regime caused by the plasmoid instability has been proposed as a possible mechanism for fast reconnection. In this work, we investigate this scenario by comparing the distribution of plasmoids obtained from Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) observational data of a coronal mass ejection event with a resistive magnetohydrodynamic simulation of a similar event. The LASCO/C2 data are analyzed using visual inspection, whereas the numerical data are analyzed using both visual inspection and a more precise topological method. Contrasting the observational data with numerical data analyzed with both methods, we …