Programme

Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental process in space, astrophysics and laboratory plasmas, by which magnetic energy was converted into plasma energy in an explosive manner. It plays a key role for many explosive events in space, the coupling between the solar wind and the terrestrial as well as other planets’ magnetospheres, and the interaction between the solar wind and the atmosphere/ionosphere of the planets without global magnetic field. Thanks to recent spacecraft missions, e.g, Cluster, THEMIS, MMS, Maven, Cassini, MESSENGER, etc, and the development of the computing simulations, fruitful new findings have been achieved in the last several years. Furthermore, many major issues on reconnection remain. For example, How the reconnection is triggered in space, how the energy is distributed, microphysics in the electron diffusion region and the separatrix region, and so on. This session invites presentations on all of the aspects associated with magnetic reconnection from the spacecraft measurements, the simulations, laboratory experiments and the theoretical analysis.