Yasuhiro Kaminou

A LABORATORY EXPERIMENT OF MAGNETIC RECONNECTION: OUTFLOWS, HEATING, AND WAVES IN CHROMOSPHERIC JETS

Hinode observations have revealed intermittent recurrent plasma ejections/jets in the chromosphere. These are interpreted as a result of non-perfectly anti-parallel magnetic reconnection, i.e. component reconnection, between a twisted magnetic flux tube and the pre-existing coronal/chromospheric magnetic field, though the fundamental physics of component reconnection is unrevealed. In this paper, we experimentally reproduced the magnetic configuration and investigated the dynamics of plasma ejections, heating and wave generation triggered by component reconnection in the chromosphere. We set plasma parameters as in the chromosphere (density 10^14 cm^-3, temperature 5-10 eV, i.e. (5-10)x10^4 K, and reconnection magnetic field 200 G) using argon plasma. Our experiment shows bi-directional outflows with the speed of 5 km/s at maximum, ion heating in the downstream area over 30 eV and magnetic fluctuations mainly at 5-10 us period. We succeeded in qualitatively reproducing chromospheric jets, but quantitatively we still have some differences between observations and experiments such as jet velocity, total energy and wave frequency. Some of them can be explained by the scale gap between solar and laboratory plasma, while the others probably by the difference of microscopy and macroscopy, collisionality and the degree of ionization, which have not been achieved in our experiment.

Stability and confinement improvement of an oblate field-reversed configuration by using neutral beam injection

A low-energy, high-current neutral beam injection (NBI) was applied to an oblate field-reversed configuration (FRC) for the first time. The NB fast ions reduce growth rates of low-n modes dangerous for the oblate FRC, extending the FRC lifetime by a factor of 1.2. The reduced loss power of 5 MW is much higher than the NBI power of 0.5 MW, indicating that the NBI not only heats the FRC plasma but also improves its stability and transport properties. The NBI also maintains higher pressure and current density profiles of the FRC, improving its flux and energy decay times by a factor of 2.

Energy conversion mechanism for electron perpendicular energy in high guide-field reconnection

The energy conversion mechanism for electron perpendicular energy, both the thermal and the kinetic energies, is investigated by means of two-dimensional, full-particle simulations in an open system. It is shown that electron perpendicular heating is mainly due to the breaking of magnetic moment conservation in separatrix region because the charge separation generates intense variation of electric field within the several electron Larmor radii. Meanwhile, electron perpendicular acceleration takes place mainly due to the polarization drift term as well as the curvature drift term of E · u ⊥ in the downstream near the X-point. The enhanced electric field due to the charge separation there results in a significant effect of the polarization drift term on the dissipation of magnetic energy within the ion inertia length in the downstream.

Numerical study of Hall effects on counter-helicity spheromak merging by two-dimensional Hall-MHD simulations

Hall effects on counter-helicity spheromak merging were investigated by two-dimensional MHD and Hall-MHD simulations of merging two axisymmetric toroidal flux tubes. In Hall-MHD cases, the structure of the reconnection current sheet and reconnection outflow are modified from the MHD case due to the Hall effect. We compared two cases (called “case-O” and “case-I”) of counter-helicity merging, which are distinguished by the polarity of toroidal magnetic fluxes. Radial motion of the reconnection X-point is controlled by poloidal electron flow accompanying the toroidal flux of the merging two spheromaks, and this creates a large difference in the current sheet and flow structure between the two cases of the Hall-MHD regime. The radial shift of the reconnection X-point depending on the polarity of toroidal magnetic flux of the spheromaks breaks the symmetry between the two cases. It was also found that there widely exists separation of ion and electron flow which are affected by the modification of the current...