Plasma Physics
Finite-amplitude low-frequency Alfv\'en waves (AWs) are ubiquitous in space plasmas, where they play a key role in the transport and dissipation of energy, particularly in the heating of ions in the solar corona and solar wind. In this…
In inertial confinement fusion (ICF), Thomson scattering (TS) is a widely used diagnostic technique for probing plasma conditions. We present a first-principles numerical approach to obtaining scattered light signals of ion acoustic…
Despite the successful demonstration of compact free electron lasers (FELs) driven by laser wakefield accelerators (LWFAs), the inherent shot-to-shot fluctuations in LWFAs, including both laser and plasma instabilities, remain a primary…
VMEC++ is a Python-friendly, from-scratch reimplementation in C++ of the Variational Moments Equilibrium Code (VMEC), a fixed- and free-boundary ideal-MHD equilibrium solver for stellarators and tokamaks. The first VMEC implementation was…
Plasma technology has undeniably revolutionized industrial processes in recent decades. Atmospheric pressure plasma (APP) has emerged as a prominent and widely applicable tool in various scientific disciplines. Notably, plasma-assisted flow…
Ballooning mode saturation is investigated in realistic stellarator configurations using the flux tube approach of Ham et. al. [1] [2]. The method is adapted to account for the lack of exact force balance in stellarator equilibrium solvers…
Classically, a charged particle in a magnetic field emits radiation, losing momentum and experiencing the Abraham-Lorentz (AL) / Landau-Lifshitz (LL) radiation reaction (RR) force. However, at atomic scales and outside the range of their…
High fidelity kinetic equilibria are crucial for tokamak modeling and analysis. Manual workflows for constructing kinetic equilibria are time consuming and subject to user error, motivating development of several automated equilibrium…
We have developed TorbeamNN: a machine learning surrogate model for the TORBEAM ray tracing code to predict electron cyclotron heating and current drive locations in tokamak plasmas. TorbeamNN provides more than a 100 times speed-up…
Plasma-based accelerators offer high accelerating gradients and scalability through staging or long plasma sources, which makes them good candidates for future accelerator and collider concepts. Proton-driven accelerators in particular have…
Magnetic reconnection is a highly dynamic process that excites a wide variety of kinetic waves and instabilities. Transverse current sheet instabilities such as the lower-hybrid drift and secondary drift-kink instabilities in particular…
Plasma-based acceleration schemes have attracted sustained interest as a pathway toward compact particle accelerators, owing to the large electric fields supported by plasmas. Although recent studies have demonstrated the excitation of…
Hard x-ray emission, associated with hot electron preheat, in direct-drive implosions was observed to be enhanced by a factor of $1.5\pm0.1$ by application of a $10$ T magnetic field. The applied magnetic field reaches a quasi steady-state…
The effect of the finite ion Larmor radius on the dynamics of two counterstreaming weakly collisional plasma flows in a magnetic field of an arch configuration is considered. Hybrid numerical simulations show that in a system whose…
Turbulence in the magnetized plasma is well understood to be the consequence of wave interactions. When the Hall effect is added to the minimum magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), the MHD waves become dispersive and different nonlinear interactions…
The self-modulation (SM) instability transforms a long charged particle bunch traveling in plasma into a train of microbunches that resonantly drives large-amplitude wakefields. We present the first determination of the saturation length of…
We report on a measurement of collective behavior in a relativistic electron-positron pair plasma produced in the laboratory. Using the Fireball platform at CERN's HiRadMat facility, 440 GeV protons were used to generate an…
Particle-in-Cell (PIC) methods have achieved widespread recognition as simple and flexible approaches to model collisionless plasma physics in fully kinetic simulations of astrophysical environments. However, in many situations the standard…
QED formulated in prescribed classical background electromagnetic fields is a standard framework for strong-field and laser\textendash matter interactions. It is usually treated as a theory modified by externally imposed fields, obscuring…
Strong magnetic fields and plasmas are intrinsically linked in both terrestrial laboratory experiments and in space phenomena. One of the most profound consequences of that is the change in relationship between the frequency and the wave…