Final Report for DOE Grant DE-FG02-03ER54712, Experimental Studies of Collisionless Reconnection Processes in Plasmas

The Grant DE-FG-02-00ER54712, ?Experimental Studies of Collisionless Reconnection Processes in Plasmas?, financed within the DoE/NSF, spanned a period from September , 2003 to August, 2007. It partly supported an MIT Research scientist, two graduate students and material expenses. The grant enabled the operation of a basic plasma physics experiment (on magnetic reconnection) at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center and the MIT Physics Department. A strong educational component characterized this work throughout, with the participation of a large number of graduate and undergraduate students and interns to the experimental activities. The study of the collisionless magnetic reconnection constituted the primary work carried out under this grant. The investigations utilized two magnetic configurations with distinct boundary conditions. Both configurations were based upon the Versatile Toroidal Facility (VTF). The first configuration is characterized by open boundary conditions where the magnetic field lines interface directly with the vacuum vessel walls. The reconnection dynamics for this configuration has been methodically characterized and it has been shown that kinetic effects related to trapped electron trajectories are responsible for the high rates of reconnection observed [7]. This type of reconnection has not been investigated before. Nevertheless, the results are directly relevant to observations by the Wind spacecraft of fast reconnection deep in the Earth magnetotail [9]. The second configuration was developed to be specifically relevant to numerical simulations of magnetic reconnection, allowing the magnetic field-lines to be contained inside the device. The configuration is compatible with the presence of large current sheets in the reconnection region and reconnection is observed in fast powerful bursts. These reconnection events facilitate the first experimental investigations of the physics governing the spontaneous onset of fast reconnection [12]. In this Report we review the general motivation of this work, the experimental set-up, and the main physics results. The details of the individual chapters are naturally contained in the relevant publications [1-12], indicated in the reference list and annexed to this Report