Experimental verification of the Hall effect during magnetic reconnection in a laboratory plasma.

In this Letter we report a clear and unambiguous observation of the out-of-plane quadrupole magnetic field suggested by numerical simulations in the reconnecting current sheet in the magnetic reconnection experiment. Measurements show that the Hall effect is large in the collision-less regime and becomes small as the collisionality increases, indicating that the Hall effect plays an important role in collision-less reconnection.