Observations of electron phase-space holes driven during magnetic reconnection in a laboratory plasma

" Observations of electron phase-space holes driven during magnetic reconnection in a laboratory plasma. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. This work presents detailed experimental observations of electron phase-space holes driven during magnetic reconnection events on the Versatile Toroidal Facility. The holes are observed to travel on the order of or faster than the electron thermal speed, and are of large size scale, with diameter of order 60 Debye lengths. In addition, they have 3-D spheroidal structure with approximately unity aspect ratio. We estimate the direct anomalous resistivity due to ion interaction with the holes and find it to be too small to affect the reconnection rate; however the holes may play a role in reining in a tail of accelerated electrons, and they indicate the presence of other processes in the reconnection layer, such as electron energization and electron beam formation.