Authors: Silvina Guidoni (American University), Rebecca Bonness (American University)

During solar eruptions, massive amounts of energy stored in the coronal magnetic field are converted into other forms within minutes. Magnetic reconnection is one of the few processes capable of swiftly converting the stored magnetic energy into kinetic energy of the coronal plasma and accelerated particles. For this process to occur, misaligned magnetic fields must collide and break across a flare current sheet formed on timescales much longer than those of the eruption. In this study, we leverage a 2.5D numerical simulation of a solar flare and coronal mass ejection conducted using the parallelized ARMS code to investigate the geometrical properties of the self-consistently formed, non-periodic, and inhomogeneous flare current sheet. This sheet forms as energy is slowly added to the system in the form of shear.  Additionally, we examine the plasma conditions at the initial single point of the current sheet where numerical fast reconnection is spontaneously triggered.