This book grew out of a month-long workshop on Magnetic Reconnection Theory held in 2004 at the Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge, UK, organized by E. R. Priest, T. G. Forbes, and J. Birn. The focus of this workshop was on the most recent advances in understanding reconnection, particularly its three-dimensional aspects and the physics of collisionless reconnection. These are the two areas where the most rapid development beyond the classical theory of reconnection has taken place in recent years. In addition, it was found desirable to include new observational aspects from the two areas that have initiated the concept of reconnection as well as provided new, unprecedented details in remote and in situ observations, the Sun and the Earth's magnetosphere.

This book highlights recent progress and thus it is not a comprehensive overview. Rather it is complementary to recent reviews by Priest and Forbes (2000) and Biskamp (2000), which cover more of the traditional approaches to reconnection. Due to the focus on new results, rather than the classical concepts, about one-third of the citations in this book are from the new millenium, years 2001 to 2005. This makes it plausible that the latest developments have not led to a settled, unified, well-accepted picture, and that some topics are still controversial, even between different authors contributing to this book. We did not try to hide those controversies. Also, we did not try to consolidate various discussions of related topics into single sections or subsections.