Plasma Physics
One of the critical challenges in future high current tokamaks is the avoidance of runaway electrons during disruptions. Here, we investigate disruptions mitigated with combined deuterium and noble gas injection in SPARC. We use…
The Reynolds number, Re, is an important quantity for describing a turbulent flow. It tells us about the bandwidth over which energy can cascade from large scales to smaller ones, prior to the onset of dissipation. However, calculating it…
The Vlasov-Poisson equations, fundamental in plasma physics and astrophysical applications, are rendered linear, finite-dimensional, and discrete by second quantization. Conditions for correspondence between the pre-quantized and quantized…
Plasma-based particle accelerators promise to extend the revolutionary work performed with conventional particle accelerators to studies with smaller footprints, lower costs, and higher energies. Here, we propose a new approach to access an…
It is argued that the Vlasov equation cannot fully account for collisionless shocks since it conserves entropy, while a shock does not. A rigorous mathematical theory of collisionless shocks could require working at the Klimontovich level.
Serial femtosecond X-ray crystallography (SFX) captures the structure and dynamics of biological macromolecules at high spatial and temporal resolutions. The ultrashort pulse produced by an X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) 'outruns' much of…
We report on an experimental study of proton acceleration by intense laser irradiation of micrometric bar targets, whose dimensions are transversely immersed in the laser focal volume and are longitudinally smaller than half its wavelength.…
The saturation level of parametric instabilities critically determines their impact on fusion plasmas. We identify the resonance density range of two-plasmon decay as the critical parameter governing nonlinear saturation of ion density…
Using particle-in-cell simulations to study fast radio burst (FRB) propagation in a tenuous plasma, we identified a novel mechanism that occurs during the growth of turbulent magnetic loops: electron penetration acceleration. The loops have…
The Centrifugal Mirror Fusion Experiment (CMFX) at the University of Maryland, College Park is a rotating mirror device that utilizes a central cathode to generate a radial electric field which induces a strongly sheared azimuthal $E\times…
We introduce a slow-wave structure (SWS) for a millimeter-wave sheet-beam traveling-wave tube (TWT) with wide bandwidth. The wideband and stable operation is enabled through the topological properties associated with glide-symmetry that…
The process of electron positron pair annihilation, driven by strong fields (Inverse Schwinger mechanism) and high-frequency waves, is studied using the Dirac Heisenberg Wigner formalism. In an electron positron plasma, the presence of a…
Driving the nuclear fusion reaction p+11B -> 3 alpha + 8.7 MeV in laboratory conditions, by interaction between high-power laser pulses and matter, has become a popular field of research, due to numerous applications that it can potentially…
During detachment, a buffer of neutral atoms and molecules builds up between the target and the ionising plasma. Collisions between the plasma and the molecules play an important role in the detachment process. Studies of plasma-molecular…
This work investigates the transitions between ohmic mode and Penning-Gamma mode in a capacitively coupled radio frequency micro atmospheric pressure plasma jets (CCRF $\mu$APPJ) operated in He/O$_2$ mixtures by comparing phase-resolved…
Global gyrokinetic simulations find a strong suppression of ion temperature gradient (ITG) turbulence by zonal flows in stellarators optimized for neoclassical transport. The reduction of the ITG transport by the zonal flows in…
Digital research data management is increasingly integrated across universities and research institutions, addressing the handling of research data throughout its lifecycle according to the FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible,…
Using a reduced MHD model, extended to include field-aligned thermal conduction, we present numerical simulations of the churning mode (CM): a toroidally symmetric, non-linear plasma vortex in the vicinity of the null points in a snowflake…
Electron energization by magnetic reconnection has historically been studied in the Lagrangian guiding-center framework. Insights from such studies include that Fermi acceleration in magnetic islands can accelerate electrons to high…
In a uniform radio-frequency (RF) plasma between a large electrode pair, the addition of an axial magnetic field induces diverse longitudinal filaments. To reveal its pattern dynamics, we conduct two-dimensional (2D) Particle-In-Cell (PIC)…