PPPL-4081 is available in pdf format (384 KB).

Experimental Verification of the Hall Effect during Magnetic Reconnection in a Laboratory Plasma

Authors: Yang Ren, Masaaki Yamada, Stefan Gerhardt, Hantao Ji, Russell Kulsrud, and Aleksey Kuritsyn

Date of PPPL Report: June 2005

Submitted to: Physical Review Letters

In this letter we report a clear and unambiguous observation of the out-of-plane quadrupole magnetic field suggested by numerical simulations in the reconnecting current sheet in the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (MRX). Measurements show that the Hall effect is large in collisionless regime and becomes small as the collisionality increases, indicating that the Hall effect plays an important role in collisionless reconnection.