Bulletin of the American Physical Society
64th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics
Volume 67, Number 15
Monday–Friday, October 17–21, 2022; Spokane, Washington
Session CM09: Mini-Conference: Heating and Non-Thermal Particle Acceleration during Magnetic Reconnection in Laboratory, Heliophysical and Astrophysical Plasmas II
2:00 PM–5:00 PM,
Monday, October 17, 2022
Room: 206 AB
Chair: Jongsoo Yoo, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory; Fan Guo, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Abstract: CM09.00009 : Evidence of non-thermal ions in a collisional, super-Alfvenic magnetic reconnection experiment diagnosed with Thomson scattering*
4:17 PM–4:31 PM
Presenter:
Lee G Suttle
(Imperial College London)
Authors:
Lee G Suttle
(Imperial College London)
Colin J Bruulsema
(Univ of Alberta)
Jack W Halliday
(Imperial College London)
Wojciech Rozmus
(Univ of Alberta)
Danny R Russell
(Imperial College London)
Vicente Valenzuela-Villaseca
(Imperial College London)
Sergey V Lebedev
(Imperial College London)
In this talk we present data from experiments carried out on the MAGPIE magnetic reconnection platform at Imperial College London, which can be interpreted as evidence for non-thermal ions accelerated in the reconnection layer.
Collective optical Thomson scattering (TS) was performed across the reconnection layer formed by the collision of super-Alfvenic outflows from two inverse wire arrays. The diagnostic setup provided spatially resolved measurements of the TS ion acoustic wave (IAW) spectra at several positions across the layer and inflowing plasma.
We find that the intensity profile of the TS spectra do not follow the expected scaling for thermally driven IAWs when the TS vector is aligned with the direction of the electric field. There is a strong enhancement of the scattered signal inside the layer which is not consistent with ion acoustic turbulence, and can neither be explained by effects of the magnetic field or particle collisions on the spectra. Analysis suggests that the observed signal is consistent with a non-thermal ion population within the reconnection layer.
*This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under Award Nos. DE-SC0020434 and DE-NA0003764, and by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under Award No. HDTRA1-20-1-0001.
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