A team led by Zhong Jiayong, professor at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the School of Physics and Astronomy of Beijing Normal University(BNU), in collaboration with research institutions including the China Institute of Atomic Energy, has published a paper titled "Laboratory Demonstration of Coronal Heating via Magnetic Reconnection during Nanoflares" in Physical Review Letters. The team provided the first laboratory demonstration of how nanoflares heat the solar corona through magnetic reconnection, showing that the Rayleigh-Taylor instability self-organizes antiparallel magnetic fields and drives reconnection that heats electrons. This work offers a critical experimental benchmark for the microphysics of energy release in the structured corona and opens new avenues for laboratory studies of astrophysical plasma dynamics.

Abstract: 

The origin of the solar corona’s million Kelvin temperatures remains a central unsolved problem. While the nanoflare hypothesis is widely accepted and describes magnetic reconnection events at coronal current sheets that are slowly formed by complex driver flows at the solar surface, the possibility remains that macroscopic fluid instabilities self-organize microscale current sheets where none previously existed. We present the first laboratory demonstration that the Rayleigh-Taylor instability self-organizes antiparallel magnetic fields, driving reconnection at r_max≈0.078 that heats electrons to T_e≈70.8±6.5  eV, twice that of shock-dominated cases. Radiative magnetohydrodynamic simulations confirm Joule heating dominates viscous dissipation. Despite differing global energy storage, our dimensionless parameters (R_m≈3 ×10³, β∈0.1−1) map to coronal rain nanojet conditions via Ryutov scaling, complementing the tearing-mode theory. This establishes the Rayleigh-Taylor instability as an efficient driver of nanoflare heating in coronal settings characterized by velocity shear and large density gradients, such as found with coronal rain.

Reference: https://doi.org/10.1103/tmll-l58c