Growth and stabilization of drift-tearing modes in weakly collisional plasmas

In the limit where the electron drift-wave frequency exceeds the electron-ion collision frequency, drift-tearing modes are found to grow with a linear growth rate independent of resistivity and proportional to the product of the electron inertial skin depth and the ion sound Larmor radius. The stabilization of these modes in collisionless and semi-collisional regimes is investigated. The stabilization mechanism is related to the coupling and propagation of drift-acoustic perturbations away from the reconnecting mode-rational surface. Analytic and numerical solutions of the four-field reduced fluid model in the slab geometry approximation with constant electron temperature and negligible ion temperature are presented. The actual stability threshold can occur at values of the normalized tearing mode stability parameter Δ' as high as 102. (author)