The main science goal of this project is to develop a better understanding of physical processes that occur before, during, and after the eruption of arched magnetic field structures on the Sun that are filled with plasma, a hot gas of electrons and ions. The solar atmosphere is a chaotic stew of such arched magnetoplasma structures that cover broad spatial and temporal scales. The tiny ones are the size of California; the Earth would be barely noticeable inside a big one. The arched magnetoplasma structures efficiently confine plasma until they become unstable and erupt. Some of these eruptions drive extremely intense energetic events that influence systems and technologies in orbit and on Earth. To get insight into the eruption processes, highly reproducible arched magnetoplasma eruptions will be generated and studied in a laboratory experiment at UCLA. In addition, collaborative efforts between plasma and solar physicists will be initiated to enhance the impact of this project in broader areas of physics. This project will also provide educational opportunities to high-school students and train a graduate student towards his/her doctorate.
Contemporary models of solar eruptions attempt to explain initiation and evolution of arched magnetoplasma structures on the Sun. It is difficult to test these models by solely relying on constraints provided by remote observations, especially since key elements (such as magnetic-field and plasma flow in the corona) are not directly measured. In this project, a series of specially designed laboratory plasma experiments will be conducted to simulate the eruption of arched magnetoplasma structures under a variety of scenarios on the Sun. These experiments will provide data with a high spatio-temporal resolution in three dimensions and will have the flexibility of testing a variety of models of solar eruptions, such as dynamic injection of magnetic flux into an arched magnetoplasma and slow-storage of magnetic energy driving a fast eruption. The arched magnetoplasma will evolve in a large background plasma produced by another source. Thousands of identical eruptions will be routinely produced and their evolution will be recorded using movable diagnostic probes and a fast CCD camera. To complement these studies, remote observational results on solar eruptions will be compared with the laboratory results for few selective cases. These research efforts are expected to contribute to a wide range of topics relevant to the Sun such as coronal mass ejections, loss of equilibrium due to force imbalance in an arched flux rope, and excitation of waves and oscillations in the solar atmosphere.
