Graduate student Thomas Varnish recently finished two weeks of experiments on the COBRA facility at Cornell, assisted by MIT grad student Lansing Horan.

Thomas again fielded tilted exploding wire arrays (pictured in a stunning long exposure image above) to study two-fluid guide-field reconnection in which we had previously observed a quadrupolar density structure.

We wanted to explore whether the reconnection heating and acceleration is predominantly along the high density separatrix, as predicted by simulations. COBRA’s Optical Thomson Scattering diagnostic is perfect for the job: we used 20 collection volumes from two scattering angles, which should allow us to reconstruct the electron and ion temperatures, and the flow velocity in a plane. Hopefully we’ll have some data for you at APS DPP!