SM027-01
Insights into Fast Magnetic Reconnection in Highly-extended Current Sheets with Laser-produced Plasmas

Friday, 11 December 2020: 04:00
Virtual
William Fox1, Derek Schaeffer2, Jackson Matteucci2, Michael Rosenberg3, Gennady Fiksel4, Hye-Sook Park5, Archie Bott6, Kirill Lezhnin2, Amitava Bhattacharjee7, Daniel Kalantar5, Bruce Remington5, Dmitri A Uzdensky8, Chikang Li9, Fredrick Seguin9 and Suxing Hu10, (1)Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ, United States, (2)Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States, (3)University of Rochester, Rochester, United States, (4)University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI, United States, (5)Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, United States, (6)Princeton University, Princeton, United States, (7)Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States, (8)University of Colorado Boulder, Physics Dept., Center for Integrated Plasma Studies, Boulder, CO, UNITED STATES, (9)Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States, (10)University of Rochester, Laboratory for Laser Energetics, Rochester, NY, United States
Recorded Presentation
Abstract:
Laser-produced plasmas provide an exciting new platform for laboratory study of magnetic reconnection for fundamental understanding and comparison with spacecraft observations. High-energy lasers produce plasmas with high Lundquist number (S > 1000) and significant scale separation between global and kinetic scales (L / di ~ 100), while employing imaging diagnostics which can bridge global and kinetic scales. We present the results on experiments studying fast magnetic reconnection at the NIF and OMEGA laser facilities. At NIF, two highly-elongated plasma plumes were produced by tiling two rows of lasers, with magnetic fields generated in each plume by the Biermann battery effect. Detailed magnetic field observations, obtained from proton radiography, reveal reconnection occurring in a highly-extended, quasi-1D current sheet with large aspect ratio ~ 100. The 1-D geometry allowed a rigorous and unique reconstruction of the magnetic field, which showed a reconnection current sheet that thinned down to a half-width close to the electron gyro-scale. Despite the large aspect ratio, a large fraction of the magnetic flux reconnected, suggesting fast reconnection supported by the non-gyrotropic electron pressure tensor.
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