Secondary Island Formation in Collisional and Collisionless Kinetic Simulations of Magnetic Reconnection

The evolution of magnetic reconnection in large-scale systems often gives rise to extended current layers that are unstable to the formation of secondary magnetic islands. The role of these islands in the reconnection process and the conditions under which they form remains a subject of debate. In this work, we benchmark two different kinetic particle-in-cell codes to address the formation of secondary islands for several types of global boundary conditions. The influence on reconnection is examined for a range of conditions and collisionality limits. Although secondary islands are observed in all cases, their influence on reconnection may be different depending on the regime. In the collisional limit, the secondary islands play a key role in breaking away from the slow Sweet-Parker scaling and pushing the evolution towards small scales where kinetic effects can dominate. In the collisionless limit, fast reconnection can proceed in small systems (30x ion inertial scale) without producing any secondary islands. However, in large-scale systems the diffusion region forms extended current layers that are unstable to the formation of secondary islands, giving rise to a time-dependent reconnection process. These instabilities provide one possible mechanism for controlling the average length of the diffusion region in large systems. New results from Fokker-Planck kinetic simulations are used to examine the role of secondary islands in electron-positron plasmas for both collisional and kinetic parameter regimes. Simple physics arguments suggest the transition should occur when the resistive layers approach the inertial scale. These expectations are confirmed by simulations, which demonstrate the average rate remains fast in large systems and is accompanied by the continuous formation of secondary islands.