Thermal Conduction of Turbulent Magnetized Plasmas Observed by Gated X-ray Detectors

Observations of temperature profiles in astrophysical plasmas, such as galaxy clusters, appear anomalously high, suggesting a strong suppression of heat conduction compared to Spitzer’s theory [1,2]. Laboratory astrophysics experiments generating comparable astrophysical conditions at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) demonstrated that the presence of turbulent-dynamo-amplified magnetic fields in large magnetic Prandtl number regimes leads to an observed reduction of heat transport by two orders of magnitude [3]. To understand how such conditions affect thermal conduction, this work leverages experimental data collected at the NIF using gated x-ray detectors (GXD). The stochastic images are used to probe the spatial electron density and temperature fluctuations. By fielding a range of different materials, the dependency of conduction suppression is explored as a function of effective ionization.

References:

[1] Markevitch et al., Astrophys. J. Lett. 586, L19 (2003)

[2] Komarov et al., Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 440, 1153 (2014)

[3] Meinecke et al., Sci. Adv. 8, eabj6799 (2022)