The Wisconsin Plasma Astrophysics Laboratory
Abstract
The Wisconsin Plasma Astrophysics Laboratory (WiPAL) is a flexible user facility designed to study a range of astrophysically relevant plasma processes as well as novel geometries that mimic astrophysical systems. A multi-cusp magnetic bucket constructed from strong samarium cobalt permanent magnets now confines a 10 m, fully ionized, magnetic-field free plasma in a spherical geometry. Plasma parameters of to eV and to cm provide an ideal testbed for a range of astrophysical experiments including self-exciting dynamos, collisionless magnetic reconnection, jet stability, stellar winds, and more. This article describes the capabilities of WiPAL along with several experiments, in both operating and planning stages, that illustrate the range of possibilities for future users.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1506.07195,
title = {The Wisconsin Plasma Astrophysics Laboratory},
author = {C. B. Forest and K. Flanagan and M. Brookhart and C. M. Cooper and M. Clark and V. Desangles and J. Egedal and D. Endrizzi and M. Miesch and I. V. Khalzov and H. Li and J. Milhone and M. Nornberg and J. Olson and E. Peterson and F. Roesler and A. Schekochihin and O. Schmitz and R. Siller and A. Spitkovsky and A. Stemo and J. Wallace and D. Weisberg and E. Zweibel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.07195},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
21 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables