February 21, 2018
Congratulations to Elizabeth for her recent publication in Journal of Plasma Physics of her work “Development of tearing instability in a current sheet forming by sheared incompressible flow”
From the abstract: “Sweet–Parker current sheets in high Lundquist number plasmas are unstable to tearing, suggesting they will not form in physical systems. Understanding magnetic reconnection thus requires study of the stability of a current sheet as it forms. […] Overall, this understanding supports the use of flow-free scalings with slight modifications to study tearing in a forming sheet.”