Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory have spent the last 16 years trying to understand the process of magnetic reconnection, a natural phenomenon that occurs when magnetic lines of force break apart and reconnect with a violent burst of energy. In huge bodies such as the Sun and other stars, magnetic reconnection has a very high explosive power.
The Magnetic Reconnection Experiment, or MRX, hopes to understand the conditions under which this reconnection takes place and the exact mechanisms that enable it to happen.
The findings are extremely important for astrophysicists, as they can help explain how the Universe works, especially in terms of the Earth’s magnetic field and sudden bursts of energy from the Sun.
The experiment works by simulating the natural process of reconnection, rather than passively waiting for the event to happen in natural plasmas, an ionized gas. Scientists direct magnetic lines of force in a controlled environment, allowing them to test reconnection under different conditions.
Hantao Ji, principal research physicist at PPPL for MRX, said in an email that “tremendous progress had been made in understanding magnetic reconnection over the past 16 years.”
“The project began by aiming to study how slow reconnection takes place and continued to research on various other aspects surrounding it, such as the speed of reconnection and scaling dynamics,” he said.
Speaking of future goals and challenges, Ji said that “currently, the MRX can access physics of magnetic reconnection in relatively cold and small plasmas while natural plasmas are often hot and large.” But learning how to apply this knowledge to natural plasmas is still a challenge, he said.
The group is planning to upgrade the principles of MRX to a larger and a more powerful experiment, tentatively called MRX-U, that could study magnetic reconnection in hotter and larger plasmas so that findings can be directly applied to the natural world.
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