Acquisition of Ultra High Speed Framing Camera to be used for Investigations of Laboratory Simulations of Solar Prominence Dynamics

California Institute Of Technology, Pasadena CA

Investigators

Abstract

The investigators will purchase an advanced high-speed camera to make sixteen frame movies of single plasma "shots". The main objective is to be able to follow magnetic reconnection and the propagation of ripples of magnetic twist (such as Alfven waves) away from regions of reconnection. The framing rate will be between 8 million and 200 million frames per second. Shot-to-shot reproducibility will no longer be a constraint because the entire fine structure evolution will be captured in a single shot. Data throughput will be increased 16-fold enabling many more experiments and investigation of many important phenomena not being pursued at present. Simulated solar prominences in the laboratory have recently been demonstrated using a unique, specially designed experimental facility at Caltech. The facility uses pulsed power plasma technology to produce a short-lived plasma (10 microseconds) with large magnetic fields (several kilogauss), high currents (tens of kiloamps), and modest dimensions (tens of centimeters). This plasma has the morphology and dynamics of a solar prominence. A program is underway to investigate the topological evolution of these simulated prominences. Topological evolution involves the breaking and reconnection of magnetic field lines and is believed to be a critical process in solar prominence eruptions. The present method for diagnosing the solar prominence simulation experiments uses a single-frame high-speed digital camera, that is a camera that takes a single photograph at a time. The technique consists of creating a sequence of identical plasma shots and then making a single ten nanosecond photo of each shot, but with increasing time offsets of a few hundred nanoseconds. The shot-to-shot reproducibility is sufficient to follow the gross variation in morphology, but not the details. Because it takes about 2 minutes to recharge the pulse power capacitor banks between plasma shots, this single-shot accumulation technique is both tedious and time consuming.