The FLARE Device and Its First Plasma Operation*

The FLARE device (Facility for LAboratory Reconnection Experiments; http://flare.pppl.gov) is a new laboratory experiment constructed at Princeton for the studies of magnetic reconnection in the multiple X-line regimes directly relevant to space, solar, astrophysical, and fusion plasmas, as guided by a reconnection phase diagram [Ji \& Daughton, Phys. Plasmas 18, 111207 (2011)]. The first plasma operation was successfully conducted to validate its engineering design and to demonstrate its experimental access to the parameter space of Lundquist number and normalized system size beyond its predecessor, MRX (Magnetic Reconnection eXperiment; http://mrx.pppl.gov). Details on construction completion and first plasma results will be presented; future operation plans - possibly as a user facility - and research plans will be discussed. In addition to the names listed above, The FLARE Team includes A. Bhattacharjee and S. Prager (Princeton Univ.), W. Daughton (LANL), W. Fox, M. Kalish, C. Meyers, Y. Ren, M. Yamada (PPPL), S.D. Bale (UC-Berkeley), T. Carter and S. Dorfman (UCLA), J. Drake (U. Maryland), J. Egedal, J. Sarff, and J. Wallace (UW-Madison).