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

调查人员将购买一台先进的高速摄像机，用单个等离子体“镜头”拍摄16帧电影。主要目标是能够跟踪磁重联和磁扭曲波纹（如阿尔芬波）从重联区域的传播。帧率将在每秒800万到2亿帧之间。镜头到镜头的再现性将不再是一个限制，因为整个精细结构的演变将被捕获在一个单一的镜头。数据吞吐量将增加16倍，使更多的实验和研究许多目前没有追求的重要现象。最近，在加州理工学院的一个独特的、专门设计的实验设备上，实验室里模拟了太阳日珥。该设施使用脉冲功率等离子体技术生产短寿命等离子体（10微秒），具有大磁场（几千高斯），高电流（几十千安培），尺寸适中（几十厘米）。这种等离子体具有日珥的形态和动力学。一个研究这些模拟日珥的拓扑演化的项目正在进行中。拓扑演化涉及到磁力线的断裂和重连，被认为是日珥爆发的关键过程。目前的日珥模拟实验诊断方法采用单帧高速数码相机，即每次只拍摄一张照片的相机。该技术包括创建一系列相同的等离子体镜头，然后为每个镜头拍摄一张10纳秒的照片，但增加几百纳秒的时间偏移。枪弹间的重现性足以反映大体形态的变化，但不能反映细节。由于两次等离子体射击之间脉冲功率电容器组的充电时间约为2分钟，因此这种单次射击积累技术既繁琐又耗时。

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.