Magnetic reconnection can occur in current sheets separating magnetic fields sheared by any angle and of arbitrarily different amplitudes. In such asymmetric and non-coplanar systems, it is not yet understood what the orientation of the X-line will be. Studying how this orientation is determined locally by the reconnection process is important to understand systems such as the Earth magnetopause, where reconnection occurs in regions with large differences in upstream plasma and field properties. This study aims at determining what the local X-line orientation is for different upstream magnetic shear angles in an asymmetric set-up relevant to the Earth’s magnetopause. We use two-dimensional hybrid simulations and vary the simulation plane orientation with regard to the fixed magnetic field profile and search for the plane maximizing the reconnection rate. We find that the plane defined by the bisector of upstream fields maximizes the reconnection rate and this appears not to depend on the magnetic shear angle, domain size or upstream plasma and asymmetries.

The proportion of metal ions in a high power impulse magnetron sputtering discharge is key information for the potential development of new materials and new layer architectures deposited by this technique. This paper aims to measure this proportion by using a homemade system consisting of a quartz crystal microbalance and a grid energy analyser assembly. Such a system yields relevant results on the composition of the post-discharge depending on the nature of the gas (Ar, Kr, Xe) and the target materials (Pt, Pd, Au, $\text{Pt}_{50}\text{Au}_{50}$ and $\text{Pt}_{5}\text{Pd}_{95}$ ). In our conditions, the highest proportion of metal ions in the post-discharge are obtained by using Ar gas and reaches 10 %, 12 %, 50 %, 19 % and 88 % for Pt, Au, Pd, $\text{Pt}_{50}\text{Au}_{50}$ and $\text{Pt}_{5}\text{Pd}_{95}$ targets, respectively.