SM42A-07
Study of Multiple Scale Physics of Magnetic Reconnection on the FLARE (Facility for Laboratory Reconnection Experiments)
Thursday, 17 December 2015: 11:44
2018 (Moscone West)
Hantao Ji1, Amitava Bhattacharjee1, Stewart Prager1, William S Daughton2, Stuart D Bale3, Troy A Carter4, Neal Crocker4, James Frederick Drake5, Jan Egedal6, John Sarff6, John Wallace6, Yangao Chen7, Robert Cutler7, William R Fox II1, Phil Heitzenroeder8, Mike Kalish8, Jonathan Jara-Almonte8, Clayton Edward Myers1, Yang Ren1, Masaaki Yamada1 and Jongsoo Yoo1, (1)Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States, (2)Los Alamos National Laboratory, Plasma Theory and App, Los Alamos, NM, United States, (3)University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States, (4)University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (5)University of Maryland College Park, College Park, MD, United States, (6)University of Wisconsin Madison, Madison, WI, United States, (7)Princeton University, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ, United States, (8)Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ, United States
Abstract:
The FLARE device (flare.pppl.gov) is a new intermediate-scale plasma experiment under construction at Princeton to study magnetic reconnection in regimes directly relevant to space, solar and astrophysical plasmas. The existing small-scale experiments have been focusing on the single X-line reconnection process either with small effective sizes or at low Lundquist numbers, but both of which are typically very large in natural plasmas. The configuration of the FLARE device is designed to provide experimental access to the new regimes involving multiple X-lines, as guided by a reconnection "phase diagram" [Ji \& Daughton, PoP (2011)]. Most of major components of the FLARE device have been designed and are under construction. The device will be assembled and installed in 2016, followed by commissioning and operation in 2017. The planned research on FLARE as a user facility will be discussed on topics including the multiple scale nature of magnetic reconnection from global fluid scales to ion and electron kinetic scales. Results from scoping simulations based on particle and fluid codes and possible comparative research with space measurements will be presented.
