Team
Thomas Varnish (he/him, tvarnish@mit.edu) is a graduate student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. He is interested in using pulsed-power experiments to better understand astrophysical plasmas. Outside of the lab, Thomas enjoys baking, knitting, and the odd bit of snowboarding. His website is thomasvarnish.co.uk
Simran Chowdhry (she/her, schowdhry@psfc.mit.edu) is a graduate student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, jointly working with Jack Hare and Nuno Loureiro. She is interested in radiative effects and instabilities in magnetic reconnection. Outside work, she enjoys playing the cello, singing and rowing.
Lansing Horan IV (lansing@mit.edu) is a graduate student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. He is interested in radiatively-cooled magnetic reconnection to learn about all sorts of cool physics things. Lansing enjoys playing board/card games, TV shows of all kinds, biking, NFL football, reading, and (most importantly) watching The Matrix movies as often as possible.
Alumni
- Dr Rishabh Datta, now working with the Disruptions group at MIT PSFC.
- Dr Antonio Magnanimo, now at the European Patent Office
- Lily Li, now working with Prof. Anne White
Collaborations
Prof. Hare is co-PI of the MARZ collaboration (Magnetically Ablated Reconnection on Z), a Z Fundamental Science collaboration to run magnetic reconnection experiments on the Z machine at Sandia national labs.
We collaborate with Prof. Loureiro’s group at MIT, who carry out theoretical work on the connections between magnetic reconnection and magneto-hydrodynamic turbulence.
We use the 3D MHD GORGON code, developed by Prof. Chittenden at Imperial College, to design and model our experiments.
We collaborate with researchers at other pulsed-power facilities across the US and internationally, including the MAIZE generator at Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the MAGPIE generator at Imperial College London. We are part of the Laboratory for Plasma Studies at Cornell, which houses the COBRA and XP facilities.
Puffins
Of course, it would be amiss not to acknowledge puffins, some of the most charismatic birds on the planet. Ungainly in flight but unbelievably elegant in the water, puffins spend the winter at sea and the summer nesting on isolated cliffs. Puffins have only one chick per year, the puffling, and they feed it on sand-eels which they scoop up from the water and collect on special barbed spikes inside their beaks. Below are some photos of puffins taken by team members:
