Science Alert April 12, 2023
Solar observations detect energetic particles and hard X-rays but cannot reveal the generating mechanism because the particle acceleration happens at a scale smaller than the observation resolution. Thus, details of the cross-scale physics that explain the generation of energetic particles and hard X-rays remain a mystery. Researchers at Caltech set up a laboratory experiment toltage spike in braided magnetic flux ropes of a 2-eV plasma when the braid strand radius was choked down to be at the kinetic scale by either magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) kink or magnetic Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities. This sequence of hat simulates solar coronal loop physics. They observed transient, localized 7.6-keV X-ray bursts and a several-kilovolt vobservations revealed a cross-scale coupling from MHD to non-MHD physics that is likely responsible for generating solar energetic particles and X-ray bursts. All the essential components of this mechanism have been separately observed in the solar corona… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Experimental setup. Credit: Nature Astronomy (2023)Â