Resistive instabilities of current sheets in stratified plasmas with a gravitational field

Abstract: Magnetic reconnection can develop spontaneously via the tearing instability, often invoked to explain disruptive instabilities in fusion devices, solar flares, the generation of periodic density disturbances at the tip of helmet streamers, and flux transfer events at the Earth's dayside magnetopause. However, in many such environments the presence of gravity, magnetic field curvature or other forms of acceleration often result in situations of a heavy-over-light plasma in an effective gravitational field with an embedded current sheet. This paper studies the linear stability of a slab current sheet with respect to reconnecting modes in the presence of a density gradient under the effect of a constant gravitational acceleration. We show that the presence of stratification and gravity modify the properties of the tearing mode instability both in the case of favorable and unfavorable stratification. Favorable stratification suppresses reconnection while unfavorable stratification strongly destabilizes the tearing mode. Furthermore, we show that the classical constant-ψ regime effectively does not exist, even for weak unfavorable stratification, for S>>1. Instead, the gravity-modified tearing progressively transitions into the G-mode, which is a gravity-driven reconnecting mode with a growth rate scaling as S^-1/3. As a consequence, unfavorable stratification only permits rapidly reconnecting modes.