I recently gave a talk for the Michigan Institute for Plasma Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann…
This is a talk I gave for the High Energy Density Science Association on Monday May 3rd, 2021.
This is a recorded version of the talk I gave last week at the APS DPP annual meeting. We found some unexpected behaviour in what we thought would be a simple collision between a magnetised plasma and a planar obstacle. We diagnose the plasma flows to determine the relevant parameters and length scales, which help us to understand what instabilities might be driving turbulence in this plasma.
The premier plasma physics event of the year, the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics Annual Meeting is now upon us. Normally this would mean jet lag, hoppy American beers, AirBnBs in dodgy parts of town and far too much cheap conference coffee.
Here’s a video of the talk I gave for the PPPL Heliophysics seminar last week. It covers research on pulsed-power driven experiments on magnetic reconnection and magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, as well as new diagnostics for plasma turbulence and the new PUFFIN pulsed-power facility to be built at MIT.
After a wonderful year of living in Munich and working at the Institute for Plasma Physics there, I decided to return to my first love: dense, magnetised plasmas. Since April 1st I’ve been working again as a post doc at Imperial College London, in the MAGPIE Group.
We’ve got a new paper out, based on some work done at MAGPIE shortly before I left. Instead of using the full one million amps to drive something using MAGPIE, we used a smaller pulsed-power device to produce a plume of plasma using a ‘plasma gun’.
My last blog post focused on new hardware for magnetic reconnection experiments. Since then, I’ve published two new papers using this hardware, as well as an improved version which allows us to study reconnection whilst varying the plasma density and magnetic field strength.
Since handing in my PHD thesis in March, I’ve been working as a Research Assistant (Post Doc) in MAGPIE. At first I was helping out others with their experiments and getting back into the flow of things, but yesterday I had the chance to try out some new hardware I’d made to do magnetic reconnection experiments.
Some thoughts on how to write a PhD thesis, from someone who just finished doing so.