Mauel delivers opening plenary lecture at the 57th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics

Professor Mike Mauel delivered the plenary lecture on "The Physics of the Laboratory Magnetosphere" during the Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics November 16, 2015 in Savannah, GA. This meeting attracts more than 2000 leading plasma physicists from around the world to discuss the latest breakthroughs and scientific studies concerning the physics of ionized matter, called "plasma".

Professor Mauel described research conducted by students and scientists at Columbia University, MIT, Dartmouth College, and University of Tokyo that have characterized a new regime of high-temperature magnetically-confined plasma called "laboratory magnetospheres." Laboratory magnetosphere gives students opportunities to explore the physics of space with precision laboratory instruments. The laboratory magnetosphere consists of a large plasma is confined by a small, magnetically levitated, superconducting current ring. Professor Mauel's plenaray lecture reviewed the observations from the levitated dipole experiments at MIT and at the University of Tokyo, showed the importance of advanced supercomputer simulations to describing complex plasma dynamics, and introduced opportunities to apply the new physics of the laboratory magnetosphere to explore turbulent transport processes within a large quasi-steady magnetized plasma torus.

The presentation reviewed the contributions of 19 doctoral dissertations including the work from Thomas Roberts, Ph.D. Columbia University, (2015); Matthew Worstell, Ph.D. Columbia University (2013); Matt Davis,  Ph.D. Columbia (2013); Brian Grierson, Ph.D. Columbia (2009); Eugenio Ortiz, Ph.D. Columbia (2007); Ben Levitt, Ph.D. Columbia (2004); Dmitry Maslovsky, Ph.D. Columbia (2003); and Harren Warren, Ph.D. Columbia (1994).