Plasma Physics
Direct laser acceleration (DLA) offers a compact source of high-charge, energetic electrons for generating secondary radiation or neutrons. While DLA in high-density plasma optimizes the energy transfer from a laser pulse to electrons, it…
Cold atmospheric pressure plasma jets (APPJs) are non-equilibrium plasmas, that are capable of producing reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (RONS) at near-room temperature. Their interaction with water leads to the formation of…
Mushroom instability (MI) is a shear instability considered responsible for generating and amplifying magnetic fields in relativistic jets. While astrophysical jets are usually magnetized, how MI acts in magnetized jets remains poorly…
The linear theory of the kinetic-ballooning-mode (KBM) instability is extended to capture a weakly-driven regime in general toroidal geometry where the destabilization is caused by the magnetic-drift resonance of the ions. Such…
The Multifaceted Asymmetric Radiation From the Edge (MARFE) is a critical plasma instability that often precedes density-limit disruptions in tokamaks, posing a significant risk to machine integrity and operational efficiency. Early and…
We report a fully kinetic, quantum study of Kinetic Electrostatic Electron Nonlinear (KEEN) waves, showing that quantum diffraction systematically erodes the classical trapping mechanism, narrow harmonic locking to the fundamental, and…
Hall Magnetohydrodynamics (HMHD) extends ideal MHD by incorporating the Hall effect via the induction equation, making it more accurate for describing plasma behavior at length scales below the ion skin depth. Despite its importance, a…
Fiber optic pulsed polarimetry is a LIDAR-like fiber sensing technique that uses a backscatter enhanced single mode backscatter-tailored optical fiber(BTOF) to measure the distributed B fields on all Magnetic Fusion Energy devices. The BTOF…
When a high-power, femtosecond, circularly polarized (CP) laser pulse is incident on a micrometer-scale aperture in a solid foil target, it drives surface plasma oscillation, generating high-order harmonic vortices in the diffracted light.…
Turbulent transport greatly impacts the performance of stellarator magnetic confinement devices. While significant progress has been made on the numerical front, theoretical understanding of turbulence in stellarators is still lacking. In…
We present a fast, spectrally accurate, automatically differentiable bounce-averaging algorithm implemented in the DESC stellarator optimization suite. Using this algorithm, we can perform efficient optimization of many objectives to…
Energetic astrophysical phenomena, such as $\gamma$-ray bursts and supernova explosion-driven shocks in collisionless plasmas, involve various plasma kinetic instabilities, such as the Weibel instability. These systems support various types…
Energetic astrophysical phenomena, such as $\gamma$-ray bursts, supernova explosions, and magnetar flares occur in collisionless plasmas and involve various plasma kinetic and magnetohydrodynamic instabilities. In this paper, we explore the…
Low-temperature plasmas are essential to both fundamental scientific research and critical industrial applications. As in many areas of science, numerical simulations have become a vital tool for uncovering new physical phenomena and…
We present calculations of diffusion coefficients in grain boundaries in Yukawa crystals for astrophysics. Our methods follow from our recent work calculating diffusion coefficients in perfect body-centered cubic crystals. These diffusion…
Turbulence is fundamental to energy transfer across scales in space and astrophysical plasmas. Bow shock interactions have long been hypothesized to significantly modify turbulence in planetary environments, yet the quantification of such…
Understanding the complex plasma dynamics in ultra-intense relativistic laser-solid interactions is of fundamental importance to the applications of laser plasma-based particle accelerators, creation of high energy-density matter,…
Various methods for leveraging turbulent fluctuation measurements from fusion plasma experiments are introduced, along with selected application examples. These can be categorized into spectral methods, statistical methods, and physics…
The self-organization is one of the most interesting phenomena in the non-equilibrium complex system, generating ordered structures of different sizes and durations. In tokamak plasmas, various self-organized phenomena have been reported,…
First numerical results from the newly-developed pseudo-spectral code P-FLARE (Penalised FLux-driven Algorithm for REduced models) are presented. This flux-driven turbulence/transport code uses a pseudo-spectral formulation with the…