Context. Plasmoid-mediated reconnection plays a fundamental role in different solar atmospheric phenomena. Numerical reproduction of this process is therefore essential for developing robust solar models.
Aims: Our goal is to assess plasmoid-mediated reconnection across various numerical resistivity models in order to investigate how plasmoid numbers and reconnection rates depend on the Lundquist number.
Methods: We used the Bifrost code to drive magnetic reconnection in a 2D coronal fan-spine topology, carrying out a parametric study of several experiments with different numerical resolution and resistivity models. We employed three anomalous resistivity models: (1) the original hyper-diffusion from Bifrost, (2) a resistivity proportional to current density, and (3) a resistivity quadratically proportional to electron drift velocity. For comparisons, experiments with uniform resistivity were also run.
Results: Plasmoid-mediated reconnection is obtained in most of the experiments. With uniform resistivity, increasing the resolution reveals higher plasmoid frequency with weaker scaling to the Lundquist number, obtaining 7.9-12 plasmoids per minute for SL ∈ [1.8 × 104, 2.6 × 105] with a scaling of SL0.210 in the highest-resolution resistivity cases, transcending into Petschek reconnection in the high-SL limit (where the diffusive effects of the resistivity become small compared to the non-uniform viscosity) and Sweet-Parker reconnection in the low-SL limit. Anomalous resistivity leads to similar results even with lower resolution. The drift-velocity-dependent resistivity excellently reproduces Petschek reconnection for any Lundquist number, and similar results are seen with resistivity proportional to current-density though with slightly lower reconnection rates and plasmoid numbers. Among the different resistivity models applied on the given numerical resolution, the hyper-diffusion model reproduced plasmoid characteristics in closest resemblance to those obtained with uniform resistivity at a significantly higher resolution.

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