Pyakurel Plasma Lab

A learning tool for students on plasma physics and magnetic reconnection, the process that powers solar flares, drives geomagnetic storms, and limits confinement in fusion devices.

How to use this site

Work through the sections in order. Each page builds on the previous one.

1. Plasma Basics: what makes a plasma different from an ordinary gas, how charged particles move in magnetic fields, and why magnetic field lines are "frozen" into a highly conducting plasma.
2. Magnetic Reconnection: what happens when that frozen-in condition breaks, the Harris current sheet, and the classic Sweet–Parker model.
3. Advanced: bending flux tubes and line-tying, vector and scalar potentials, the flux function \(\psi\), X-points, O-points and islands, the reconnection rate and Ohm's law, how a field line moves into the X-line, and the derivation of the resistive MHD equations. Start here once you are comfortable with sections 1 and 2.
4. Simulation Lab: download a small Python code that solves resistive MHD in Cartesian or spherical geometry, in 2D or 3D. Choose parameters on the site, run on your own computer, and visualize the fields and flows.

Prerequisites

You should be comfortable with vector calculus (divergence, curl, gradient) and Maxwell's equations at the level of an undergraduate electromagnetism course.

Coming later

• Petschek reconnection and the "fast reconnection" problem
• Hall reconnection and the ion/electron diffusion regions
• The plasmoid instability
• Spacecraft observations