Origins of effective resistivity in collisionless magnetic reconnection

The mechanisms that provide effective resistivity for supporting collisonless magnetic reconnection have remained unsettled despite numerous studies. Some of these studies demonstrated that the electron pressure nongyrotropy generates the resistivity (ηnpg) in the electron diffusion region (EDR). We derive an analytical relation for the effective resistivity (ηkin) by momentum balance in a control volume in the EDR. Both ηnpg and ηkin mutually compare well and they also compare well with the resistivity required to support reconnection electric field Erec in multi-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations as well as in satellite observations when reconnection occurs in an EDR. But they are about an order of magnitude or so smaller than that required when the reconnection occurred in a much wider reconnecting current sheet (RCS) of half width (w) of the order of the ion skin depth (di), observed in the Earth magnetosphere. The chaos-induced resistivity reported in the literature is found to be even more deficient. We find that for reconnection in RCS with w ∼ di, anomalous diffusion, such as the universal Bhom diffusion and/or that arising from kinetic Alfven waves, could fairly well account for the required resistivity