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U.S. Department of Energy
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Regimes of Kinetic Magnetic Reconnection in the Laboratory (Final Technical Report)

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1841773· OSTI ID:1841773

The DOE award No. DE-SC0019153, supported in part one graduate student (J. Olson) and material expenses, enabling the student to prepare a basic plasma physics experiment on magnetic reconnection (which we now call the Terrestrial Reconnection Experiment, TREX) within at the Wisconsin Plasma Physics Laboratory (WiPPL). The study of the collisionless magnetic reconnection constituted the primary research carried out under this grant and lead to new observations of unexpected shock formation below the TREX reconnection layer. The shock formation was found fundamental to regulating the normalized rate of reconnection, and the results were part of our experimental observations detailed in a paper first authored by Dr. J. Olson and now published in the Journal of Plasma Physics. In this Report we review the general motivation of this work and provide an overview of our experimental results enabled by the support through the award.

Research Organization:
Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
DOE Contract Number:
SC0019153; MSN219966
OSTI ID:
1841773
Report Number(s):
DE-SC0019153; MSN219966; TRN: US2302715
Resource Relation:
Related Information: J. Olson, J. Egedal, et al., “Regulation of the normalized rate of driven magnetic reconnection through shocked flux pileup”, (2021) Jour. Plasma Phys. 87, 175870301.
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English