Barriers in the transition to global chaos in collisionless magnetic reconnection. II. Field line spectroscopy

The transitional phase from local to global chaos in the magnetic field of a reconnecting current layer is investigated. The identification of the ridges in the field of the finite time Lyapunov exponent as barriers to the field line motion is carried out adopting the technique of field line spectroscopy to analyze the radial position of a field line while it winds its way through partial stochastic layers and to compare the frequencies of the field line motion with the corresponding frequencies of the distinguished hyperbolic field lines that are the nonlinear generalizations of linear X-lines. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3647330]