Lansing S. Horan IV

Lansing Horan is a graduate student in nuclear science and engineering studying radiatively cooled magnetic reconnection. Reconnection is a fundamental physical process occurring in magnetized plasmas throughout the universe, including black hole accretion disks and the solar chromosphere. Theorists predict that reconnection heating drives high-energy X-ray emission from many astrophysical plasmas. To validate recent theoretical models and simulations of these radiative reconnection events, Lansing’s laboratory astrophysics research uses precision diagnostics to measure reconnecting plasma conditions. He uses laser shadowgraphy—a specialized diagnostic for plasma imaging—to measure the density structure of a radiative reconnection layer on experiments at Sandia’s Z pulsed-power facility. MATLAB enables Lansing to post-process these and other diagnostic data. He has also adapted inversion techniques to extract electron density profiles from the noisy experimental images. As a MathWorks Fellow, Lansing will develop advanced processing workflows to fully analyze the myriad of data from specialized plasma diagnostics. His research could provide crucial experimental validation of key instabilities in reconnection physics.