Studying Guide-Field Reconnection with Tilted Exploding Wire Arrays on MAIZE

We present results from experiments using our new tilted wire array platform on the MAIZE facility (~500 kA peak current, 150 ns rise time) to study pulsed-power driven magnetic reconnection with an embedded guide field. We rotate the two arrays of a dual exploding wire array load in opposite directions, such that there is both an anti-parallel reconnecting component of the magnetic field, and an out-of-plane guide field component in the colliding plasma flows. Between these arrays, a current sheet is formed from the interaction of oppositely-directed magnetic fields (~2 T) advected by carbon plasma flows moving at ~50-100 km/s. We study three tilt angles: 0, 22.5, and 45 degrees, with corresponding guide-field-to-reconnecting-field ratios of 0, 0.4, and 1, respectively. Line-integrated electron density measurements of the reconnection layer were made using a simultaneous end-on and side-on Mach-Zehnder IR interferometry system (1064 nm, 2 ns, 40 uJ). Measurements were taken at different times after current start on different shots to study the evolution of the layer. An optical fast-framing camera observed the plasma dynamics, whilst differential B-dot probes measured the inflowing magnetic field.