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.
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.
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.
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…
Shocks are very important in physics and engineering. They occur whenever there are large pressures involved. In plasmas, we often…
There’s been a lot of buzz about a press release from Lockheed Martin about a fusion concept they’ve been working on.…