In this work, we compare gyrokinetic (GK) with fully kinetic Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulations of magnetic reconnection in the limit of strong guide field. In particular, we analyze the limits of applicability of the GK plasma model compared to a fully kinetic description of force free current sheets for finite guide fields (bg ). Here, we report the first part of an extended comparison, focusing on the macroscopic effects of the electron flows. For a low beta plasma (βi = 0.01), it is shown that both plasma models develop magnetic reconnection with similar features in the secondary magnetic islands if a sufficiently high guide field (bg ≳ 30) is imposed in the kinetic PIC simulations. Outside of these regions, in the separatrices close to the X points, the convergence between both plasma descriptions is less restrictive (bg ≳ 5). Kinetic PIC simulations using guide fields bg ≲ 30 reveal secondary magnetic islands with a core magnetic field and less energetic flows inside of them in comparison to the GK or kinetic PIC runs with stronger guide fields. We find that these processes are mostly due to an initial shear flow absent in the GK initialization and negligible in the kinetic PIC high guide field regime, in addition to fast outflows on the order of the ion thermal speed that violate the GK ordering. Since secondary magnetic islands appear after the reconnection peak time, a kinetic PIC/GK comparison is more accurate in the linear phase of magnetic reconnection. For a high beta plasma (βi = 1.0) where reconnection rates and fluctuations levels are reduced, similar processes happen in the secondary magnetic islands in the fully kinetic description, but requiring much lower guide fields (bg ≲ 3).
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Gyrokinetic and kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of guide-field reconnection. I. Macroscopic effects of the electron flows
Guiding-center transformation of the radiation-reaction force in a nonuniform magnetic field. (arXiv:1412.1966v2 [physics.plasm-ph] UPDATED)
In this paper, we present the guiding-center transformation of the radiation-reaction force of a classical point charge traveling in a nonuniform magnetic field. The transformation is valid as long as the gyroradius of the charged particles is much smaller than the magnetic field nonuniformity length scale, so that the guiding-center Lie-transform method is applicable. Elimination of the gyromotion time scale from the radiation-reaction force is obtained with the Poisson bracket formalism originally introduced by [A. J. Brizard, Phys. Plasmas 11 4429 (2004)], where it was used to eliminate the fast gyromotion from the Fokker-Planck collision operator. The formalism presented here is applicable to the motion of charged particles in planetary magnetic fields as well as in magnetic confinement fusion plasmas, where the corresponding so-called synchrotron radiation can be detected. Applications of the guiding-center radiation-reaction force include tracing of charged particle orbits in complex magnetic fields as well as kinetic description of plasma when the loss of energy and momentum due to radiation plays an important role, e.g., for runaway electron dynamics in tokamaks.