  We examine the dynamics of magnetic flux tubes containing non-trivial field
line braiding (or linkage), using mathematical and computational modelling, in
the context of testable predictions for the laboratory and their significance
for solar coronal heating. We investigate the existence of braided force-free
equilibria, and demonstrate that for a field anchored at perfectly-conducting
plates, these equilibria exist and contain current sheets whose thickness
scales inversely with the braid complexity - as measured for example by the
topological entropy. By contrast, for a periodic domain braided exact
equilibria typically do not exist, while approximate equilibria contain thin
current sheets. In the presence of resistivity, reconnection is triggered at
the current sheets and a turbulent relaxation ensues. We finish by discussing
the properties of the turbulent relaxation and the existence of constraints
that may mean that the final state is not the linear force-free field predicted
by Taylor's hypothesis.
