Magnetised turbulence in through pulsed-power-driven magnetic flux-tube merging

Magnetised turbulence is a key driver of many important phenomena in astrophysical plasmas, but studying magnetised turbulence in the laboratory poses two major challenges - accessing high Reynolds numbers on laboratory length scales, and reliably diagnosing the fundamentally three-dimensional nature of the turbulence.

We present experimental results from a new pulsed-power-driven platform based on flux-tube merging, in which magnetised supersonic carbon flows converge inside a cylindrical wire array to produce a column of turbulent plasma.This column is confined for much longer than the hydrodynamic time scales by continuous inflows of plasma from the wires, and the magnetic fields are dynamically and energetically significant, which is an astrophysically relevant regime.

We characterise this plasma using a suite of spatially and temporally resolved diagnostics, including ultra high speed imaging, laser shadowgraphy, interferometry, Thomson scattering and Faraday rotation imaging. We discuss new diagnostics such as the imaging refractometer which can be used to measure the power spectrum and intermittency of turbulence in these experiments, and a new pulsed-power facility, PUFFIN, at MIT, which will be used to continue these experiments.