Preliminary Results for Experiment at WiPPL

The Sun, being an active star, undergoes eruptions of magnetic fields and charged particles that reach the Earth and cause the aurora near the poles.

Some eruptions may be more powerful than others, resulting in an Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejection (ICME) that can cause major damage to our modern electrical systems without warning.

We want to form a better understanding of how the ICMEs interact to create a more predictive model for them to more effectively defend our systems from a potentially devastating ICME.

For this project, we use the Big Red Ball (BRB) facility at the Wisconsin Plasma Physics Laboratory (WiPPL). The BRB is a 3-meter diameter plasma confinement system equipped with around 200 ports for diagnostic acess. Using the BRB, we affirmatively answer the question, ``Can we create a scaled analog of an ICME in a laboratory environment?'' My presentation will show some preliminary data from this experiment and provide some insight to the methods of analysis.