It has been suggested [Kleva and Guzdar, Phys. Plasmas 6 , 116 (1999)] that reconnecting ballooning modes in which electron inertia replaces resistivity in a nonideal magnetohydrodynamic Ohm’s law can have substantial growth rates in the low collisionality regime. Numerical calculation, albeit necessarily at unrealistically large values of the collisionless skin depth, showed that strongly growing ballooning modes exist at beta values which are below the ideal beta limit. In order to investigate stability at more realistic values of the skin depth we exploit an analytic approach.
