The Aurora is one of the most beautiful phenomena in the solar system, and it is intrinsically linked to an elegant and ubiquitous process called Magnetic Reconnection.
My colleague Guy Burdiak has been working on making magnets for MAGPIE since I arrived at Imperial College, and yesterday I had a chance to help him out with the final winding process.
Experiments on MAGPIE are expensive in terms of time and equipment – at best we can achieve one experiment a…
In my last blog post I discussed measuring the temperature of a plasma. I talked about firing an intense laser…
Plasmas tend to be quite hot. This is because they consist of electrons and ions, which are strongly attracted to…
I’ve already done some preliminary experiments on passing a large electrical current through some pencil leads to turn them into…
Part 2 follows on from my previous post about how the intense electromagnetic pulse is generated. In this post I…
The load, an elegant sculpture hours in the making, nanoseconds to destroy. We’ve been working on it for days, probably.…
It’s been a hard few months on MAGPIE. Constant component breakdown, electrical failures, maintenance periods and attempting to bring on-line…
Shocks are very important in physics and engineering. They occur whenever there are large pressures involved. In plasmas, we often…