Experimental Verification of the Hall Effect during Magnetic Reconnection in a Laboratory Plasma

Yang Ren, Masaaki Yamada, Stefan Gerhardt, Hantao Ji, Russell Kulsrud, and Aleksey Kuritsyn
Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 055003 – Published 29 July 2005

Abstract

In this Letter we report a clear and unambiguous observation of the out-of-plane quadrupole magnetic field suggested by numerical simulations in the reconnecting current sheet in the magnetic reconnection experiment. Measurements show that the Hall effect is large in the collisionless regime and becomes small as the collisionality increases, indicating that the Hall effect plays an important role in collisionless reconnection.

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  • Received 29 December 2004

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.055003

©2005 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Yang Ren, Masaaki Yamada, Stefan Gerhardt, Hantao Ji, Russell Kulsrud, and Aleksey Kuritsyn

  • Center for Magnetic Self-Organization in Laboratory and Astrophysical Plasmas, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08543, USA

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Issue

Vol. 95, Iss. 5 — 29 July 2005

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