Laboratory Experiments Scaled to Solar and Space Plasmas

Abstract

Modern experimental facilities with their precision diagnostic tools and ability to accurately control the system parameters may be used to mimic various astrophysical processes and applying high repetitive rate, change parameters of a system, and identify missing elements in physics of studied phenomena. In order to apply laboratory results to astrophysical phenomena one needs to satisfy similarity criteria (Ryutov et al., Plasma Phys Control Fusion 54:105021, 2012). In this chapter we first describe the MHD type similarities and then briefly discuss several exemplary experiments, such as studies of magnetically driven plasma jets , bow shocks, magnetic field generation and self-organization , instabilities, and formation of solar tadpoles . The main goal of this chapter is to bring attention of solar physicists to excellent results obtained in laboratory astrophysics and, using simple scaling criteria , apply these results to observational data.