[IGPP Everyone] SPACE PHYSICS and HERMES SCIENCE CENTER SEMINAR - Fall Quarter - Friday November 13, 2020 - 3:30pm - UCLA Zoom

[Marjorie Sowmendran]

SPACE PHYSICS and HERMES SCIENCE CENTER SEMINAR 



ZOOM LINK PROVIDED BELOW 





https://ucla.zoom.us/j/93382900867?pwd=TlVQRmZyVEJFa0FCZWlRMU0yREtjUT09 







Date/Time: November 13, 2020/ 03:30 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada) 




SPACE PHYSICS and HERMES SCIENCE CENTER SEMINAR 







DEPARTMENT OF EARTH, PLANETARY, AND SPACE SCIENCES 

DEPARTMENT OF ATMOSPHERIC AND OCEANIC SCIENCES 

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES 





Exploring driven collisionless reconnection in the Terrestrial Reconnection Experiment (TREX) 
J. Egedal, U. of Wisconsin 

The Terrestrial Reconnection Experiment (TREX) [1] executed in the Big Red Ball at the University of Wisconsin is optimized to study magnetic reconnection in a regime where Coulomb collisions between electrons and ions are sufficiently infrequent that kinetic effects in the electron dynamics are retained. In this talk I will review the experimental configuration and review early significant results but then turn to important recent discoveries. Upgrades to the reconnection drive now allows us to access are more fully collisionless regime in which electron pressure anisotropy develops and is fundamental to the structure of the electron diffusion region. The observed signatures of reconnection include narrow electron jets and current layers with widths down to the scale length of the electron skin depth, confirming previous results from fully kinetic simulations. Driven reconnection scenarios are important to a range of systems including the interaction of stellar winds with planetary magnetospheres. We also observe a shock interface to form between the supersonically driven plasma inflow; a region of magnetic flux pileup permits the normalized reconnection rate to self-regulate to a value where the inflow speed is about 50% of the Alfvenic outflow speeds observed in the reconnection exhaust, weakly dependent on the system size. 

[1] J. Olson, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett 116, 255001 (2016 ) 
[2] C.B. Forest, et al., Jour. Plasma Phys., 81, 345810501 (2015 ) 



Friday, November 13, 2020 

3:30 - 5:00 PM 




In-Charge: Marco Velli 













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