Local Measurement of Nonclassical Ion Heating during Magnetic Reconnection
Authors: S.C. Hsu, G. Fiksel, T.A. Carter, H. Ji, R.M. Kulsrud, and M. Yamada
Date of PPPL Report: November 1999
Published in: Phys. Rev. Lett. 84 (April 2000) 3859-3862.
Local ion temperature is measured directly in the well-characterized reconnection layer of a laboratory plasma. These measurements demonstrate definitively that ions are heated due to reconnection and that more than half of the reconnected field energy is converted to ion kinetic energy. Neither classical Ohmic dissipation nor thermalization of energetic flows is sufficent to account for the energy converted, suggesting the importance of non-classical dissipation mechanisms such as wave-particle interactions.