Reply To: New Focus Fusion myspace.

[jamesr]

Alex Pollard wrote:

These findings should have significant implications for fusion research and the physics of magnetic reconnection.

Doesn’t magnetic reconnection stem from mistaken attempts to explain solar flares without acknowledging the electric currents that cause them?

http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=22&start=0

Doesn’t inspire any confidence that Tri Alpha are on the right track.

Magnetic reconnection is key , as you say, to solar flares. But I wouldn’t say they are mistaken attempts. They have known for years simple resistive MHD models are insufficient to explain reconnection rates that fast, and that you at least need to consider the Hall term in Ohm’s law ie currents flowing across the field, and the differing resistivity parallel and perpendicular to the magnetic field.
There has been quite a bit of progress in recent years modeling for example Ellerman Bombs, and how they relate to flux emergence from the sun’s photosphere.

Here is one paper from 2002 on observations
http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/575/1/506/pdf/0004-637X_575_1_506.pdf
And one from 2009 on the modeling
http://www-solar.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/~vasilis/12455.pdf