Plasma Physics
Designing superconducting coils for a tokamak fusion device is a highly coupled, non-linear design problem. The coils have many disparate engineering requirements from structural to power electronics, as well strict limits placed on the…
In plasma X ray photoelectron spectroscopy emerges as a powerful platform for real time, in situ chemical analysis under conditions relevant to semiconductor processing and other plasma enabled technologies. This study investigates the…
The dynamics of plasmas are governed by a set of non-linear differential equations which remain challenging to solve directly for large 2D and 3D problems. Here we investigate how tensor networks could be applied to plasmas described by the…
We investigate the process of creating electron-positron pairs from laser-matter interaction in pre-ionised foam targets using particle-in-cell simulations. A high-intensity laser pulse drives electrons via direct laser acceleration up to a…
Edge transport barriers (ETBs) in magnetically confined fusion plasmas, commonly known as pedestals, play a crucial role in achieving high confinement plasmas. However, their defining characteristic, a steep rise in plasma pressure over…
We introduce a new approach to measure the magnetic pitch angle profile in tokamak plasmas with Doppler backscattering (DBS), a technique traditionally used for measuring flows and density fluctuations. The DBS signal is maximised when its…
The effect of magnetic islands on plasma flow and turbulence has been experimentally investigated in the stellarator W7-X. Magnetic configurations with the 5/5 magnetic island positioned at the plasma edge, inside the last closed flux…
Radial profiles of density fluctuations and radial electric field, $E_r$, have been measured using Doppler reflectometry during the post-pellet enhanced confinement phase achieved, under different heating power levels and magnetic…
Absolute extreme ultraviolet (AXUV) diode arrays are widely used in fusion experiments for time-resolved measurements of plasma radiation. We report the first implementation of an AXUV-based analysis framework on the Wisconsin…
Shattered Pellet Injection (SPI) has become a critical technique for mitigating plasma disruptions in fusion devices, yet optimizing its efficiency demands a proper understanding of the interaction between impurity dynamics and MHD…
A common occurrence in weakly collisional space plasmas is the unequal electron-ion temperatures. The pressure-strain interaction provides a mechanism-agnostic pathway for increasing plasma internal energy through spatiotemporally local…
Permanent magnets provide an attractive path for shaping university-scale stellarator magnetic fields. Previous work has shown that greedy permanent magnet optimization (GPMO) can produce sparse, grid-aligned arrays that match target…
We report on random errors in kinetic temperature measurements due to finite spatial resolution in particle tracking velocimetry. Using simulated data, we isolate the error caused by finite spatial resolution from other sources of…
The Plasma Liner Experiment (PLX) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is a platform that seeks to achieve fusion via the Plasma-Jet-Driven Magneto-Inertial Fusion (PJMIF) concept. The experiment utilizes a constellation of plasma guns…
In this study, the energy exchange between electrons and ions in ITG TEM turbulence is investigated using gyrokinetic simulations. The energy exchange in TEM turbulence is primarily composed of the cooling of electrons associated with…
Several different schemes for plasma wakefield acceleration using a train of drivers have been pursued, based on the resonant excitation of a plasma wave. Since these schemes rely on the plasma electron wave surviving for many periods, the…
Integrals of the Liouville $1$-form, known as the first Poincar\'e integral invariant, provide a computable figure of merit for monitoring the conservation of symplecticity in the numerical integration of Hamiltonian systems. These…
Microbubble implosion (MBI) is a recently proposed novel mechanism with many interesting and exciting potential applications. MBI predicts that the inner layers of a spherical target with a hollow cavity can be compressed into a core with a…
Photoionization plays a crucial role in achieving accurate quantitative predictions in SF6 streamer simulations, but accurate models for SF6 photoionization remains limited, motivating this paper. First, we develop a computational model for…
JAX-in-Cell is a fully electromagnetic, multispecies, and relativistic 1D3V Particle-in-Cell (PIC) framework implemented entirely in JAX. It provides a modern, Python-based alternative to traditional PIC frameworks. It leverages…