Rapid Reconnection and Compressible Plasma Waves

Magnetic reconnection causes the local non-linear decay of an infinitely thin current sheet, i.e., a tangential discontinuity, into large amplitude magnetohydrodynamic waves. This decay process propagates along the initial current sheet and induces linear wave perturbations in the surroundings. The Greens function for the self-consistent linear compressible plane wave problem is constructed and it is shown how to perform the convolution with some source function in form of a local reconnection pulse in an efficient way.