The following article first appeared as David C. Pace, William W. Heidbrink, and Michael A. Van Zeeland, “Keeping Fusion Plasmas Hot,” Physics Today 68, 34 (2015). In the article, we discuss interactions between high energy ions and electromagnetic waves in magnetically confined plasmas. These plasmas are produced in nuclear fusion reactors known as tokamaks. My research […]
Example of Langmuir Probe Analysis
Sections Processing the Raw Data Determining Electron Temperature and Plasma Potential Calculating Electron Density An Additional Concern for Temperature Analysis Sample Data for Practice This is a simple example of Langmuir probe analysis and the issues related to it. It is intended to serve as a helpful reminder of the technical details in analyzing the […]
Thesis – Chapter 1: Introduction
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 […]