Plasma Physics
The electrical environment of a ground vacuum testing chamber creates facility effects for gridded ion thrusters. For example, it is well known that the plume from the thruster generates current paths that are very different from what…
Recent studies have identified plasma as a topological material. Yet, these researches often depict plasma as a fluid governed by electromagnetic fields, i.e., a classical wave system. Indeed, plasma transport can be characterized by a…
Classical Cherenkov radiation is a celebrated physics phenomenon of electromagnetic (EM) radiation stimulated by an electric charge moving with constant velocity in a three dimensional dielectric medium. Cherenkov radiation has a wide…
While fusion reactors known as tokamaks hold promise as a firm energy source, advances in plasma control, and handling of events where control of plasmas is lost, are needed for them to be economical. A significant bottleneck towards…
We investigate the discharge characteristics of a low-pressure geometrically asymmetric cylindrical capacitively coupled plasma discharge with an axisymmetric magnetic field generating an EXB drift in the azimuthal direction. Vital…
We study the validity of gyrokinetic theory by examining the destruction of magnetic moment adiabatic invariant in the presence of fluctuations. Contrary to common assertions, it is shown for the first time that the gyrokinetic theory rests…
Direct laser electron acceleration in near-critical density plasma produces collimated electron beams with high charge $Q$ (up to $\mu$C). This regime could be of interest for high energy THz radiation generation, as many of the mechanisms…
This Letter presents a magnetohydrodynamic model that describes the small-amplitude fluctuations with wavelengths comparable to ion inertial length in the presence of a relativistically strong mean magnetic field. The set of derived…
We investigate the confinement properties of two recently devised quasi-helically symmetric stellarator configurations, HSK and QSTK. Both have been optimized for large critical gradients of the ion temperature gradient mode, which is an…
Magnetic fields generated from a laser-foil interaction are measured with high fidelity using a proton radiography scheme with in situ x-ray fiducials. In contrast to prior findings under similar experimental conditions, this technique…
Recently, it has been shown that altering the natural collisional power flow of the proton-Boron 11 (pB11) fusion reaction can significantly reduce the Lawson product of ion density and confinement time required to achieve ignition.…
For 1-dimensional applications, Bude's method [Bude et al, Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion, 63 (2021) 035014] has been shown to be capable of accurately solving the all-FLR (Finite Larmor Radius) integro-differential wave equation as a…
Electrostatic charge dissipation is one of the major concerns for satellites operating in the Earth's orbits. Under energetic plasma conditions, they may acquire very high negative potential (up to 10's of kV) due to the collection of…
In this paper, we investigate the kinetic stability of classical, collisional plasma - that is, plasma in which the mean-free-path $\lambda$ of constituent particles is short compared to the length scale $L$ over which fields and bulk…
In this paper, we introduce and discuss an exactly energy-conserving Particle-in-Cell method for arbitrary curvilinear coordinates. The flexibility provided by curvilinear coordinates enables the study of plasmas in complex-shaped domains…
The ITG and TEM instabilities with quasi-coherent spectra have been identified experimentally, by the newly developed far-forward collective scattering measurements in J-TEXT tokamak Ohmical plasmas. The ITG mode has characteristic…
A fundamental dynamical constraint -- that fluctuation induced charge-weighted particle flux must vanish -- can prevent instabilities from accessing the free energy in the strong gradients characteristic of Transport Barriers (TBs). Density…
Stand-off runaway electron termination by injected tungsten particulates offers a plausible option in the toolbox of disruption mitigation. Tungsten is an attractive material choice for this application due to large electron stopping power…
Previously, using an incompressible von K\'arm\'an-Howarth formalism, the behavior of cross-scale energy transfer in magnetic reconnection and turbulence was found to be essentially identical to each other, independent of an external…
Absolute value measurements of turbulence amplitude in magnetically confined high-temperature plasmas can effectively explain turbulence-driven transport characteristics and their role in plasma confinements. Two-dimensional phase contrast…