FLARE (Facility for Laboratory Reconnection Experiments): A Major Next-Step for Laboratory Studies of Magnetic Reconnection

A new intermediate-scale plasma experiment, called the Facility for Laboratory Reconnection Experiments or FLARE, is under construction at Princeton as a joint project by five universities and two national labs to study magnetic reconnection in regimes directly relevant to space, solar and astrophysical plasmas. The currently existing small-scale experiments have been focusing on the single X-line reconnection process in plasmas either with small effective sizes or at low Lundquist numbers, both of which are typically very large in natural plasmas. These new regimes involve multiple X-lines as guided by a reconnection "phase diagram", in which different coupling mechanisms from the global system scale to the local dissipation scale are classified into different reconnection phases [H. Ji & W. Daughton, Phys. Plasmas 18, 111207 (2011)]. The design of the FLARE device is based on the existing Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (MRX) at Princeton (http://mrx.pppl.gov) and is to provide experimental access to the new phases involving multiple X-lines at large effective sizes and high Lundquist numbers, directly relevant to space and solar plasmas. The motivating major physics questions, the construction status, and the planned collaborative research especially with space and solar research communities will be discussed.