Thomson Scattering Measurements of Pulsed-Power-Driven Guide Field Reconnection Experiments on COBRA

We present Thomson scattering measurements from pulsed-power-driven guide-field magnetic reconnection experiments on the COBRA facility (1 MA, 100 ns rise-time) at Cornell University. We use a dual exploding wire array, where plasma ablated from the arrays advects magnetic fields (~3 T) and collides, forming a reconnection layer. These two arrays are tilted in opposing directions, re-orienting their azimuthal magnetic fields into orthogonal anti-parallel and guide-field components, embedded in the flows. For these experiments, we study guide-field ratios, b, of 0 and 1. We diagnose these experiments with B-dot probes, two simultaneous laser interferometers along orthogonal lines of sight, and collective Thomson scattering from ion acoustic waves. Previous experiments with this platform on the MAIZE facility at the University of Michigan showed a quadrupolar structure formed at the reconnection layer when b~1, bifurcating the outflows along the separatrices. The addition of Thomson scattering now enables measurements of the inflow/outflow velocities and temperature, and thus studies of both the outflow structure and heating within the layer.