Magnetic Reconnection in the Lower Solar Atmosphere (Joint CLaSP-MIPSE seminar)

This talk will describe aspects of the plasma physics of magnetic reconnection in the lower solar atmosphere. Magnetic reconnection is the prototypical example of a nonlinear magnetized plasma phenomenon that couples physical processes across decades of spatial and temporal scales. Today, the basic physics of magnetic reconnection is being explored in a variety of plasma parameter regimes from collisionless fully ionized plasmas, to relativistic radiation-dominated plasmas, to strongly-coupled high energy density plasmas. The lower solar atmosphere, in particular, provides a range of contexts and environments in which to study magnetic reconnection, with the dynamics of the process strongly impacting the evolution of solar magnetic fields, particle acceleration, and other observables. Here, numerical explorations of the dynamics of magnetic reconnection in the weakly ionized plasma of the solar chromosphere and a low-beta plasma of the solar corona will be presented.
Dr. Vyacheslav (Slava) Lukin received the BA in Physics and Mathematics from Swarthmore College and PhD in Astrophysical Sciences from Princeton Univ. His PhD studies, split between Princeton Univ. and Los Alamos Nat'l Lab, were supported by graduate fellowships administered by ORISE Fusion Energy Sciences program and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Lukin completed a DOE FES sponsored postdoctoral fellowship at the Univ. of Washington in 2009, when he joined the staff of the Naval Research Laboratory, Space Sciences Division. Dr. Lukin is the lead developer of the HiFi open source multi-fluid modeling framework with users around the world and published applications to laboratory, space, and solar plasmas. Since late 2014, Dr. Lukin is a Program Director in the NSF Division of Physics with responsibility for programs in Plasma Physics and Accelerator Sciences.