SPD 08 poster

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Solar Physics Division 2008 Student Poster Award

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About Laurel Rachmeler

Laurel Rachmeler

I am currently a 4th year graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences Dept. I work with Dr. Craig DeForest at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder on modeling low-beta magnetic fields. I use a novel computer code called FLUX to do this, which treats the field as a collection of discrete 'fieldlines' as opposed to a collection of values on a 3-D grid.

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About the Science

The poster below details my work with FLUX in which I simulate a system that exhibits coronal jet behavior when magnetic reconnection is present. I directly compared reconnectionless results from FLUX with previous results from the ARMS (adaptive mesh refinement) code, which does include reconnection. The two systems were virtually identical until the twist reached a critical level and a kink-like behavior was observed. I demonstrated that the kinking in this case did not release significant amounts of energy into the surrounding field, but did break the azimuthal symmetry, enabling reconnection to release it. The movies, which I showed with the poster, are also linked below.

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