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Y. E. Litvinenko (University of New Hampshire)
The rate of two-dimensional flux pile-up magnetic reconnection is known to be severely limited by gas pressure in a low-beta plasma of the solar corona. For a two-dimensional stagnation point flow with nonzero vorticity, for example, the rate cannot exceed the Sweet-Parker scaling. The limitation should be less restrictive, however, for three-dimensional flux pile-up. This paper examines the maximum rate of three-dimensional pile-up reconnection in the approximation of reduced magnetohydrodynamics (RMHD), which is valid in the solar coronal loops. Gas pressure effects are ignored in RMHD, but a similar limitation on the rate of magnetic merging exists. Both the magnetic energy dissipation rate and the reconnection electric field are shown to increase by several orders of magnitude in RMHD as compared with strictly two-dimensional pile-up. This is enough to explain small solar flares and slow coronal transients with energy release rates of order 1025 - 1026 erg s-1, as well as heating of quiet coronal loops. Notably, the reconnection electric field is several orders of magnitude greater than the Dreicer field, hence it can efficiently accelerate charged particles in flares. This work was supported by NSF grant ATM-9813933.