Developing Pulsed Power Driven Turbulent Reconnection Platforms

The objective of this research is to develop a new experimental platforms for studying magnetic reconnection in a magnetized plasma, a gas of electrically charged particles permeated by magnetic fields. The Earth can be thought of as a spacecraft surrounded by the solar wind, a swirling sea of hot plasma ejected from the Sun. The Earth's magnetic field usually protects us from this solar wind, but intense solar storms can break through and cause significant damage to the orbiting satellites used for communication and navigation, and potentially even damage power grids and other infrastructure on the Earth's surface.

Predicting these damaging solar storms is an ongoing challenge, and involves a detailed understanding of a process called magnetic reconnection, which enables these storms to explosively erupt from the Sun's surface. Better understanding of magnetic reconnection using new dedicated laboratory experiments supported by this award will improve our ability to model and forecast these damaging storms.

Magnetic reconnection and turbulence are fundamentally linked processes - instabilities in the reconnection layer drive a turbulent cascade, and this turbulence in turn efficiently drives reconnection at smaller and smaller scales. Studying turbulent reconnection layers in the laboratory is an outstanding challenge, requiring hot plasmas to be created and sustained, as well as new diagnostics to resolve a wide range of spatial scales.

This award will use a new pulsed-power driven experimental platform to study different methods of producing a turbulent reconnection layer, with the goal of understanding how turbulence enhances the reconnection rate with applications to astrophysical plasmas as well as novel fusion experiments using magnetized high-energy-density plasmas. A successful platform will enable access to a unique regime of magnetized plasma turbulence, offering insight into important open questions in modern theories of plasma turbulence: the existence of critical balance, the transition from the magnetohydrodynamic to kinetic regime at small length scales, and the uneven partition of energy between the electrons and ions.

This award is made with support from the National Nuclear Security Administration within the Department of Energy.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.