Shizuo Inoue

Ion and electron heating characteristics of magnetic reconnection in tokamak plasma merging experiments

Recently, the TS-3 and TS-4 tokamak merging experiments revealed significant plasma heating during magnetic reconnection. A key question is how and where ions and electrons are heated during magnetic reconnection. Two-dimensional measurements of ion and electron temperatures and plasma flow made clear that electrons are heated inside the current sheet mainly by the Ohmic heating and ions are heated in the downstream areas mainly by the reconnection outflows. The outflow kinetic energy is thermalized by the fast shock formation and viscous damping. The magnetic reconnection converts the reconnecting magnetic field energy mostly to the ion thermal energy in the outflow region whose size is much larger than the current sheet size for electron heating. The ion heating energy is proportional to the square of the reconnection magnetic field component . This scaling of reconnection heating indicates the significant ion heating effect of magnetic reconnection, which leads to a new high-field reconnection heating experiment for fusion plasmas.

Non-local drift instability of current-carrying plasma with temperature inhomogeneities

The current-driven (CD) drift instability of a collisionless plasma with both electron and ion temperature inhomogeneities in a sheared magnetic field is investigated. It is found that the CD mode can become unstable with the universal mode is stable, and that the positive ion temperature gradient affects the stability by suppression (or reduction) of convective damping through magnetic shear. The resulting particle and heat fluxes due to the CD mode are also obtained.

Physical processes of driven magnetic reconnection in collisionless plasmas: Zero guide field case

The key physical processes of the electron and ion dynamics, the structure of the electric and magnetic fields, and how particles gain energy in the driven magnetic reconnection in collisionless plasmas for the zero guide field case are presented. The key kinetic physics is the decoupling of electron and ion dynamics around the magnetic reconnection region, where the magnetic field is reversed and the electron and ion orbits are meandering, and around the separatrix region, where electrons move mainly along the field line and ions move mainly across the field line. The decoupling of the electron and ion dynamics causes charge separation to produce a pair of in-plane bipolar converging electrostatic electric field ( E→es) pointing toward the neutral sheet in the magnetic field reversal region and the monopolar E→es around the separatrix region. A pair of electron jets emanating from the reconnection current layer generate the quadrupole out-of-plane magnetic field, which causes the parallel electric field ...

Numerical study of energy conversion mechanism of magnetic reconnection in the presence of high guide field

The first two-dimensional particle in cell simulation of the reconnection region of two merging torus plasmas lead us to quantitative studies on the energy conversion mechanism under a high out-of-plane (guide) magnetic field condition. Even with the existence of the strong guide field, magnetic reconnection causes the efficient conversion of in-plane (poloidal) magnetic field energy. The ratio of the plasma kinetic energy flux of ions to that of electrons is roughly two to one, in agreement with the recent experimental results. Due to the suppression of nonlinear dynamics of ions motions in the vicinity of the reconnection region with guide field, the major energy flux of ions is changed to the flow energy flux. For electrons, a field-aligned acceleration caused by parallel electric field generates the non-thermal electrons through trapping (bouncing) effect, which is exhausted as the anisotropic energy flux of electrons. The inventory of the converted magnetic energy in the case with the guide field is quantitatively revealed.

Laboratory study of diffusion region with electron energization during high guide field reconnection

Floating potential profile was measured around the X-point during high guide field reconnection in UTST merging experiment where the ratio of guide field ( Bg) to reconnecting magnetic field ( Brec) is Bg/Brec>10. Floating potential measurement revealed that a quadrupole structure of electric potential is formed around the X-point during the fast reconnection phase due to the polarization by inductive electric field. Also, our floating potential measurement revealed the existence of parallel electric field in the vicinity of the X-point. While field-aligned components of inductive electric field ( E∥ind) and electrostatic electric field ( E∥es) cancel out with each other away from the X-point, E∥ind exceeds E∥es around the X-point, indicating the deviation from ideal MHD criterion within the region. The diffusion region extends in the outflow region and the scale length of region is an order of ion skin depth, which is quite different from the VTF experiment result. Based on the measured magnetic field an...