Magnetic reconnection phenomena are investigated taking into account all three vector components of the magnetic field in a laboratory experiment. Two toroidal magnetized plasmas carrying identical toroidal currents and poloidal field configurations are made to collide, thereby inducing magnetic reconnection. The direction of the toroidal field plays an important role in the merging process. It is found that plasmas of antiparallel helicity merge much faster than those of parallel helicity. It is also found that the reconnection rate is proportional to the initial relative velocity of the two plasma tori, suggesting that magnetic reconnection, in the present experiment, is a forced phenomenon.
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Yamada et al. (1990) studied this question.
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