Global and local relaxations in magnetohydrodynamic plasmas

Abstract
Based on theoretical and computational considerations, it is confirmed that magnetic reconnection driven nonlinearly by a kink instability plays a key role in the magnetohydrodynamic relaxation. An important finding is that the relaxation takes the form of either global relaxation (e.g., the reversed field pinch relaxation) or local relaxation (e.g., the tokamak sawtooth relaxation), depending on whether the driven reconnection is total (antiparallel) or partial (partially antiparallel).