Magnetic Reconnection by a Self-Retreating X Line

Particle-in-cell simulations of collisionless magnetic reconnection are performed to study asymmetric reconnection in which an outflow is blocked by a hard wall while leaving sufficiently large room for the outflow of the opposite direction. This condition leads to a slow, roughly constant motion of the diffusion region away from the wall, the so-called “X-line retreat.” The typical retreat speed is ∼0.1 times the Alfvén speed. At the diffusion region, ion flow pattern shows strong asymmetry and the ion stagnation point and the X line are not collocated. A surprise, however, is that the reconnection rate remains the same unaffected by the retreat motion.