Thesis – Table of Contents Introduction 1.1 Motivation Anomalous transport is an area of great interest within the plasma physics research community. The field of magnetically confined thermonuclear fusion may benefit significantly from an improved understanding of this topic. It has already been shown that turbulent fluctuations increase the transport of mass and energy [Horton, […]
Ph.D. Thesis Project: Thermal Waves and Turbulent Structures in Magnetized Plasmas
I completed my Ph.D. thesis in 2009. Copies of it are available in both PDF and HTML format. The PDF is the source for the printed copies that were turned in to the UCLA Library as part of the requirements for completion. The web version omits the front matter but does present every chapter and […]
Energetic ion transport by microturbulence is insignificant in tokamaks
This paper means a lot to me. It has both a technical side and an emotional side. The physics of this paper concerns how small scale turbulent fluctuations in the plasma (e.g., fluctuations of the plasma density) can affect the way that energetic ions move across the magnetic field. Fundamentally, the orbit size of these […]
Energetic Ion Loss Detector on the Alcator C-Mod Tokamak
This paper describes the Fast Ion Loss Detector (FILD) at the Alcator C-Mod tokamak. The FILD captures ions that are accelerated to high energies due to radio wave power injection into C-Mod. A couple of neat things about this diagnostic are that it is made of the same molybdenum material as the walls in C-Mod, and […]
Scrape-off layer ion acceleration during fast wave injection in the DIII-D tokamak
This paper describes observations of injected radio wave power getting absorbed by edge ions in the DIII-D tokamak. It’s a valuable observation because we inject those radio waves in order to heat the plasma more towards the center of the tokamak, so if some of that energy gets absorbed by particles in the far edge, then […]
Transport of energetic ions due to sawteeth, Alfvén eigenmodes, and microturbulence
This paper discusses three different plasma phenomena that lead to transport of beam ions in tokamaks. The material was first presented as an invited talk at the 23rd IAEA Fusion Energy Conference in Daejon, Republic of Korea in 2010. That IAEA meeting is held every two years and it represents the largest (most important?) fusion-specific […]