Speaker
Description
Magnetic Reconnection is the ubiquitous astrophysical process in which a plasma rapidly converts magnetic field energy into a combination of flow energy, thermal energy and non-thermal energetic particles. Various particle acceleration mechanism (including Fermi acceleration, betatron acceleration, parallel electric field acceleration, out-of-reconnection plane acceleration) have been theoretically proposed and numerically studied in collisionless low-Beta environments. Recently [1], this environment has been experimentally studied using the Omega-EP platform. Using kJ lasers, we drive parallel currents through capacitive coil targets to achieve MegaGauss-level magnetic reconnection. We summarize results indicating that the primary acceleration mechanism in this setup is the out-of-plane reconnection electric field. We then present future laser-target reconnection concepts that will allow us to both further verify these results and study alternative particle acceleration mechanisms.
References:
[1] A. Chien, L. Gao, S. Zhang, H. Ji, E. G. Blackman, W. Daughton, A. Stanier, A. Le, F. Guo, R. Follett, H. Chen, G. Fiksel, G. Bleotu, R. C. Cauble, S. N. Chen, A. Fazzini, K. Flippo, O. French, D. H. Froula, J. Fuchs, S. Fujioka, K. Hill, S. Klein, C. Kuranz, P. Nilson, A. Rasmus, and R. Takizawa, “Non-thermal electron acceleration from magnetically driven reconnection in a laboratory plasma,” Nature Physics 19, 254–262 (2023)
