Plasma Physics
The support structure is an integral part of the design of nuclear fusion reactors, especially 3D stellarator devices. A practical reactor's coils and support structures must have three competing qualities: an accurate magnetic field for…
Using 20 OMEGA laser beams at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, University of Rochester, to irradiate a flat plastic target in a hollow ring configuration, we created supersonic cylindrical stable plasma jets with self-generated…
Evolution of the hot spot plasma conditions was measured using high-resolution x-ray spectroscopy at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). The capsules were filled with DD gas with trace levels of Kr, and had either a high-density-carbon…
SoPlasmaFoam is an open-source, multi-region plasma-dielectric solver built on OpenFOAM, integrated with the PETSc linear-algebra suite (CPU and GPU back-ends), the blastAMR adaptive-mesh-refinement library (hexahedral and polyhedral…
The interaction of ultraintense lasers with magnetized overdense plasmas reveals a fundamentally new regime of laser-driven particle acceleration. Particle-in-cell simulations demonstrate the generation of directional, quasi-monoenergetic…
This work presents deep learning models to predict magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium parameters and profiles for the ADITYA-U tokamak. A synthetic free-boundary equilibrium dataset consisting of 100,760 cases was generated using the pyIPREQ…
We present a linear gyrokinetic theory for the electromagnetic collisionless trapped-electron mode (CTEM). It is found that the weak electromagnetic effects of CTEMs originate from the particle dynamics. Theoretical analysis reveals that…
Plasma diagnostic models for tokamak fusion devices are almost universally evaluated on clean, complete sensor data. In practice, fusion diagnostics fail regularly: acquisition systems start late, individual sensors die, and signal dropouts…
Using fully kinetic simulations that capture unprecedentedly large (from electron to ion) scales, we study magnetogenesis driven by continuous large-scale forcing until nonlinear dynamo saturation. We uncover a two-stage mechanism in…
Plasma in nuclear fusion reactors is only partially observable: diagnostics are constrained by limited access, cost, and the harsh plasma environment, while high-fidelity simulations remain prohibitively costly at reactor-relevant scales to…
We investigate the dynamics of charged particles interacting with ultra-intense electromagnetic X-modes in strongly magnetized plasmas. We demonstrate that particle motion becomes chaotic for relative wave intensities $\delta = B_w/B_0…
The moving multi-mirror (MMM) concept mitigates axial losses in magnetic mirrors by using inward-propagating multi-mirror sections to transport escaping particles back toward the central cell. Single-particle simulations are used to…
Robust control of plasma current ramp-up is an absolute necessity, as an efficient and uncontaminated plasma current ramp-up is essential for achieving prolonged, high-pressure tokamak plasma discharges. In conventional tokamaks with Ohmic…
The state-of-the-art concerning the modeling of the thermomechanical response of graphite to runaway electron (RE) impact is based on one-way coupled linear thermoelasticity combined with Rankine's strength-based failure criterion and…
We present an integrated, three-dimensional, fully kinetic particle-in-cell simulation of field-reversed-configuration (FRC) formation at the device scale. To our knowledge, this is the first fully kinetic model of whole-device FRC…
This dissertation focuses on Atmosphere-Breathing Electric Propulsion (ABEP) for propellant-less continuous orbiting in very low Earth orbits (VLEO) and very low Mars orbits (VLMO). ABEP utilizes an intake to collect atmospheric particles…
High-brilliance sources of polarized gamma rays are widely sought after to pump and probe matter at subatomic length scales. However, existing accelerator facilities and optical lasers cannot reach a sufficiently high center-of-mass energy…
In homogeneous magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence without a background magnetic field driven by mechanical forces, an exact decomposition of the energy fluxes (D. Capocci et al., Journal of Plasma Physics, 91(1), E11 (2025)) has shown…
A specially shielded CdTe detector based hard X-ray (HXR) monitoring system equipped with a lead collimator has been developed and installed on the Aditya-U tokamak to investigate the dynamics of fast electrons (~20-200 keV) generated…
We derive an extended wave action model for equatorial chorus waves, identifying a wave activity index (a version of the Benjamin-Feir index, BFI) which indicates non-Gaussian frequency spectra emerge when BFI$>$0.5. Global maps of this…