SOLARNET Conference: The Many Scales of the Magnetic Sun

Magnetic reconnection seems to be the central mechanism that powers solar flares by suddenly releasing magnetic energy. On the other hand Hall effect, the interaction between electric currents and the magnetic fields that surround them creates the conditions for fast magnetic reconnection. In the present research work, we perform a systematic comparison of 2.5D numerical resistive MHD simulations, aiming to determine the impact of the Hall term on the magnetic reconnection rate, the energy release and transfer in solar flares. The numerical simulations are performed with the code MAGNUS, which is a resistive MHD code with heat flux terms that now includes partially ionized plasmas and non-linear effects like the Hall and the ambipolar diffusion terms. We consider the solar atmosphere using a realistic stratified equilibrium temperature profile. The initial configuration for the magnetic field profile corresponds to a force-free Harris current sheet, and we adopted a spatially localized resistivity model. Preliminary results show that the inclusion of the Hall effect significantly increases the reconnected flow and the reconnection rate compared to the purely resistive simulations. For the evolution of energy, the reconnection process converts the incoming Poynting flux into plasma energy that accelerates the particles and this conversion occurs more efficiently when the Hall effect is considered.