Description
A major goal for magnetic reconnection research is to understand reconnection with self-generated turbulence, which appears central to solar flares and other energy releases in solar and space plasmas. In nature, reconnection occurs for a wide range of shear angles, including when upstream magnetic fields are close to antiparallel. Existing numerical studies of 3D self-generated turbulent reconnection have considered cases with a non-zero guide field, and it is an important limitation that their setups are often unable to address antiparallel reconnection in 3D. Here, we compare two experimental setups. The first is based on flux-rope merging with closed boundaries and it has been used previously by various groups around the world, e.g. Huang & Bhattacharjee 2016, Beg et al. 2022 and Vicentin et al. 2025. However, it cannot model antiparallel turbulent reconnection because the initial flux ropes are kink-unstable in the absence of a sufficiently strong guide field. A new setup solves this problem by modelling a zoomed-in section of the reconnection layer using inflow and outflow boundaries. Both models are used to simulate reconnection in 2D and 3D, using the Lare code, with and without guide fields. We explore the strength and weakness of the two approaches, including the range of shear angles they can model in fully 3D simulations.
