Table-top solar flares produced with laser driven magnetic reconnections

¹ Key Laboratory of Optical Astronomy, National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100012, China
² Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
³ State Key Laboratory of Nuclear Physics & Technology, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
⁴ Research Center for Laser Fusion, China Academy of Engineering Physics, Mianyang 621900, China
⁵ National Laboratory on High Power Lasers and Physics, Shanghai 201800, China
⁶ Center for Applied Physics and Technology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
⁷ Institute for Fusion and simulation, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China
⁸ Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, Beijing 100094, China
⁹ Departmem of Physics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China

Published online: 15 November 2013

Abstract

The American Nuclear Society (ANS) has presented the prestigious Edward Teller award to Dr. Bruce A. Remington during the 2011 IFSA conference due to his “pioneering scientific work in the fields of inertial confinement fusion (ICF), and especially developing an international effort in high energy density laboratory astrophysics” [1,2]. This is a great acknowledgement to the subject of high energy density laboratory astrophysics. In this context, we report here one experiment conducted to model solar flares in the laboratory with intense lasers [3]. The mega-gauss –scale magnetic fields produced by laser produced plasmas can be used to make magnetic reconnection topology. We have produced one table-top solar flare in our laboratory experiment with the same geometric setup as associated with solar flares.