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.
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…
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…
Hidden Canyon, Zion National Park, Utah. Own Work. The plasmas we make on MAGPIE don’t hang around for long –…
There hasn’t been much science done on MAGPIE since the end of February. After the upgrade to our lighting, we…
I’ve spent the last week and a bit helping to fix one of the four capacitor banks in MAGPIE. It’s…