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 […]
Thesis – Appendix B: Pulse Detection Techniques
Thesis – Table of Contents Pulse Detection Techniques Overview The study of exponential spectra and accompanying Lorentzian pulses in time series data requires that the pulses be isolated for determining their characteristic widths. A variety of identification techniques have been applied to the large data set of this experiment, and notes on two of these […]
Thesis – Appendix A: Wavelet Analysis to Calculate Power Spectra
Thesis – Table of Contents Wavelet Analysis to Calculate Power Spectra Overview Wavelet analysis techniques, while not as commonly understood as Fourier analysis, are nonetheless frequently applied to problems in which time and frequency information are desired simultaneously. Analysis suites such as IDL (popular in plasma physics circles) provide complete libraries for easily incorporating these […]