Magnetohydrodynamic study of three-dimensional instability of the spontaneous fast magnetic reconnection

Three-dimensional instability of the spontaneous fast magnetic reconnection is studied with magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulation, where the two-dimensional model of the spontaneous fast magnetic reconnection is destabilized in three dimension. Generally, in two-dimensional magnetic reconnection models, every plasma condition is assumed to be uniform in the sheet current direction. In such two-dimensional MHD simulations, the current sheet destabilized by the initial resistive disturbance can be developed to fast magnetic reconnection by a current driven anomalous resistivity. In this paper, the initial resistive disturbance includes a small amount of fluctuations in the sheet current direction, i.e., along the magnetic neutral line. The other conditions are the same as that of previous two-dimensional MHD studies for fast magnetic reconnection. Accordingly, we may expect that approximately two-dimensional fast magnetic reconnection occurs in the MHD simulation. In fact, the fast magnetic reconnection activated on the first stage of the simulation is two dimensional. However, on the subsequent stages, it spontaneously becomes three dimensional and is strongly localized in the sheet current direction. The resulting three-dimensional fast magnetic reconnection intermittently ejects three-dimensional magnetic loops. Such intermittent ejections of the three-dimensional loops are similar to the intermittent downflows observed in the solar flares. The ejection of the three-dimensional loops seems to be random but, numerically and theoretically, it is shown that the aspect ratio of the ejected loops is limited under a criterion.