Temperature and plasma-β. Panel a: evolution of the maximum temperature T_max in the vicinity of the reconnection region. The differently colored lines display the models with different plasma-β according to the legend. This is similar to the plots in Fig. 2. Panel b: peak temperature, T_peak, (with the standard deviation of T_max shown as bars) for each of the runs as a function of plasma-β. For illustrative purposes the red line in panel b indicates a power law T_peak ∝ β^− 0.3. See Sect. 3.3 for a definition of T_peak and a more general discussion.