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

POSTER

Abstract

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)

*This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) under Award Number DE-NA0004144. The Flash Center acknowledges support by the U.S. DOE NNSA under Awards DE-NA0002724, DE-NA0003605, DE-NA0003842, DE-NA0003934, and Subcontracts 630138 and C4574 with Los Alamos National Laboratory; the National Science Foundation under Award PHY-2308844; and the U.S. DOE Office of Science Fusion Energy Sciences under Award DE-SC0021990.

Presenters

  • Hannah Poole

    • University of Oxford
    • University of Rochester

Authors

  • Hannah Poole

    • University of Oxford
    • University of Rochester

  • Archie F.A. Bott

    • University of Oxford

  • Charlotte A Palmer

    • Queen's University Belfast

  • Igor E Golovkin

    • Prism Computational Sciences, Inc.

  • Joe Holder

    • Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

  • Nobuhiko Izumi

    • Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

  • Jena Meinecke

    • Gettysburg

  • Kassie Moczulski

    • University of Rochester

  • Hye-Sook Park

    • Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

  • James S Ross

    • Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
    • Livermore

  • Clement A Trosseille

    • Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

  • Timothy Walton

    • Prism Computational Sciences, Inc.

  • Alexander A Schekochihin

    • Univ of Oxford
    • Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford, Clarendon Laboratory, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PU, UK

  • Don Q Lamb

    • University of Chicago

  • Petros Tzeferacos

    • University of Rochester

  • Gianluca Gregori

    • University of Oxford