Fast reconnection timescales: solar flares vs tokamaks

21:21>> minutes for a solar flare. In talkax it'll take milliseconds. >> I was going to say cuz if the so at a solar flare >> solar flare we've seen those things right we we can observe them now with our solar telescopes and you can just see the solar flare forming and within hours and minutes it'll just shoot out >> which which is incredible cuz that means anything we're doing locally on the planet earth like the tokamax system for like nuclear power production. >> Yeah. Where we're trying to concentrate it into such a small volume >> means that >> it's going to be even faster >> faster. The time scale is faster. >> Right. And the time scale on Tokamax is something like milliseconds, >> right? That makes sense. That makes sense. >> So So, so now we've got You said it was going to be months to ears. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> And And we're we're we're seeing hours

22:03to minutes. >> So we're orders of magnitude off. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's not even a factor of two. It's a factor of like 10 to the six. >> Right. Right. Right. >> Right. There's something really wrong. >> The Sweet Parker model is not correct. >> Is not correct. Right. [laughter] And and I have to say um Parker there he he's a great plasma physicist. He's the guy who actually showed that the the solar atmosphere is unstable and we should have something like the solar wind. So he literally predicted the solar wind from first principles. Right? So >> all the credit to him. This guy was this guy was this guy was someone who could have won the Nobel Prize had he lived long enough. Right. But you know you win some you lose some. >> Look that's the next life.

22:44>> Yeah. Yeah. In the next life. >> Exactly. So this is where our um hero Nuno Lurerio comes in. Okay. >> He is in Princeton Plasma Physics Lab at the time. >> Go Tigers. >> Yeah, I [laughter] I I was waiting for that. So he's at Princeton Plasma Physics at the time. He actually did his um earlier training at UCL. And >> what he notices is that this doesn't work, guys. And it was it was a known problem for like 50 years, right? But in 2005, he actually showed that these current cheats are violently unstable. And this is a this is a slide that I got from one of his talks.

23:24>> Okay. >> Where in the in the beginning he's like, "Does the sweet Parker modal work?" Sure. For this regime. >> And [laughter] then he's like, "Maybe it doesn't." This guy was cheeky, dude. Yeah. It's kind of funny, right? So this is in 2005. He's doing numerical simulations to show exactly what would happen. And and notice that there's this bubble that's forming >> on on this on the graphic that's to the right of these three examples where it says maybe it doesn't. >> Yeah, maybe it doesn't. And and there's a sheet and as the sheet is getting sort of stretched, there's a bubble that's forming. Okay. That is going to be the main contribution that he makes in 2007 with a paper in the physics of plasmas

24:06with Lorio um Shakot Shahin and Cowi. Yes, >> this is the paper that makes him famous. Okay, this is the one that has the most citations. It's got like 800 citations, which in plasma physics is like unreal.