Related papers: Optimizing stellarators for large flows
A potential threat to the performance of magnetically confined fusion plasmas is the problem of impurity accumulation, which causes the concentration of highly charged impurity ions to rise uncontrollably in the center of the plasma and…
Scalar cosmological perturbations of a weakly self-interacting plasma mixed with a perfect radiation fluid are investigated. Effects of this plasma are considered through order $\lambda^{3/2}$ of perturbative thermal-field-theory in the…
Treatments of plasma waves usually assume homogeneity, but the parallel gradients ubiquitous in plasmas can modify wave propagation and absorption. We derive a quasilocal inhomogeneous correction to the plasma dielectric for arbitrary…
Quasisymmetry and omnigeneity of an equilibrium magnetic field are two distinct properties proposed to ensure radial localization of collisionless trapped particles in any stellarator. These constraints are incompletely explored, but have…
Stellarators are magnetic confinement devices under active development to deliver steady-state carbon-free fusion energy. Their design involves a high-dimensional, constrained optimization problem that requires expensive physics simulations…
Sheared toroidal flows can cause bifurcations to zero-turbulent-transport states in tokamak plasmas. The maximum temperature gradients that can be reached are limited by subcritical turbulence driven by the parallel velocity gradient. Here…
The Doppler backscattering (DBS) diagnostic, also referred to as Doppler reflectometry, measures turbulent density fluctuations of intermediate length scales. However, when the beam's wavevector is not properly aligned perpendicular to the…
The transport of heat out of tokamak plasmas by turbulence is the dominant mechanism limiting the performance of fusion reactors. Turbulence can be driven by the ion temperature gradient (ITG) and suppressed by toroidal sheared flows.…
Tokamak turbulence, driven by the ion-temperature gradient and occurring in the presence of flow shear, is investigated by means of local, ion-scale, electrostatic gyrokinetic simulations (with both kinetic ions and electrons) of the…
Quasisymmetry is an unusual symmetry that can be present in toroidal magnetic fields, enabling confinement of charged particles and plasma. Here it is shown that both quasi-axisymmetry and quasi-helical symmetry can be achieved to a much…
Plasma turbulence is the dominant transport mechanism for heat and particles in magnetized plasmas in linear devices and tokamaks, so the study of turbulence is important in limiting and controlling this transport. Linear devices provide an…
The condition of quasi-isodynamicity is derived to second order in the distance from the magnetic axis. We do so using a formulation of omnigenity that explicitly requires the balance between the radial particle drifts at opposite bounce…
We construct smooth, non-symmetric plasma equilibria which possess closed, nested flux surfaces and solve the magnetohydrostatic (steady three-dimensional incompressible Euler) equations with a small force. The solutions are also `nearly'…
To analyze the joint development of two-stream and filamentation kinetic instabilities in a plasma with a particle beam, a quasilinear approach has been developed that accounts for the integral nonlinear interaction of modes arising from…
Recent gyrokinetic stability calculations have revealed that the spherical tokamak is susceptible to tearing parity instabilities with length scales of a few ion Larmor radii perpendicular to the magnetic field lines. Here we investigate…
A particle produced in a hard collision can lose energy through bremsstrahlung. It has long been of interest to calculate the effect on bremsstrahlung if the particle is produced inside a finite-size QCD medium such as a quark-gluon plasma.…
Continuous control over azimuthal flow and shear in the edge of the Large Plasma Device (LAPD) has been achieved using a biasable limiter which has allowed a careful study of the effect of flow shear on pressure-gradient-driven turbulence…
Counter-streaming systems are a canonical model for beam-plasma instabilities, such as the filamentation instability, which is critical in high energy density physics. However, scenarios involving intersecting fast electron beams break the…
Kappa distributions are ubiquitous in space and astrophysical poorly collisional plasmas, such as the solar wind, suggesting that microscopic and macroscopic properties of these non-equilibrium plasmas are highly conditioned by the…
Scalar cosmological perturbations with nearly flat power spectrum may originate from perturbations of the phase of a scalar field conformally coupled to gravity and rolling down negative quartic potential. We consider a version of this…