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，以拍摄16帧单次等离子体拍摄的电影。主要目标是能够跟踪磁重联和远离重联区域的磁扭曲波纹(如阿尔芬波)的传播。成帧速率将在每秒800万到2亿帧之间。逐个镜头的重复性将不再是一个限制，因为整个精细结构的演变将在一次镜头中捕捉到。数据吞吐量将增加16倍，从而能够进行更多的实验和对许多目前没有进行的重要现象的研究。实验室中的模拟日冕最近利用加州理工学院一个独特的、特别设计的实验设备进行了演示。该设施使用脉冲功率等离子体技术来产生具有大磁场(几千古斯)、大电流(数万安培)和中等尺寸(数十厘米)的短寿命等离子体(10微秒)。这种等离子体具有日冕的形态和动力学特征。一项研究这些模拟日冕的拓扑演化的计划正在进行中。拓扑演化涉及磁力线的断裂和重新连接，被认为是日冕喷发的关键过程。目前诊断日冕模拟实验的方法是使用单帧高速数码相机，即一次拍摄一张照片的相机。这项技术包括创建一系列相同的等离子照片，然后为每一张照片制作一张10纳秒的照片，但时间偏移量增加到几百纳秒。镜头对镜头的重现性足以遵循形态上的总体变化，但不能遵循细节。由于在两次等离子发射之间对脉冲功率电容器组进行充电需要大约2分钟，因此这种单次发射累积技术既繁琐又耗时。

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.