Exploratory Simulations of Plasmoid Dynamics in the FLARE experiment

In high-Lundquist number regimes, reconnection layers are unstable to the plasmoid instability leading to a hierarchy of magnetic islands and new current sheets that can approach kinetic scales. While this scenario offers a natural mechanism for bridging scales, it has not yet been validated experimentally, which is one major goal for the new FLARE experiment. Here we present exploratory simulations of FLARE to understand the current sheet formation and resulting onset of plasmoids in both MHD and kinetic regimes. These fully kinetic simulations are performed with a new cylindrical version of the VPIC code including the vacuum vessel, flux cores, drive coils and with a Monte-Carlo treatment of Coulomb collisions. These initial 2D and 3D simulations suggest that a rich dynamical evolution may be accessible.