A new way of studying magnetic reconnection
Photographer: Illustration: Longqing Yi/Chalmers University of Technology
The picture shows the experiment setup. The laser (the red triangle on the right) hits the micro-scale film (the grey slab), which splits the beam like a knife. Electrons accelerate on both sides of the ‘knife’ and produce strong currents, along with extremely strong, anti-parallel magnetic fields. Magnetic reconnection occurs beyond the end of the film (the blue frame). The magnetic field is illustrated with black arrows. The boomerang-like structures illustrate the electrons in the different stages of the simulation. The rainbow colours represent the electrons’ transverse momenta.