Experiments on Alfven Waves

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Alfven waves are ubiquitous in space plasmas and their signatures have been observed by many spacecraft under a variety of conditions. A large amount of theoretical work and computer simulations deal with them directly or indirectly although there have been a disproportionately small amount of laboratory experiments in this area. The reason for this is the lack of laboratory plasma sources in which clean, and detailed studies of these waves can be performed. Recently, a machine has been constructed at UCLA which features a 10m long, 50 cm diameter plasma column. The machine can be operated in a regime of moderate density, highly ionized (99%) He or H plasmas in a uniform axial field of up to 2.5 kG. We propose a series of experiments to verify that we can launch and detect Alfven waves, and then diagnose them with a sate-of-the-art data collection and visualization system.