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Plasma Physics

Book

ITER Physics

C. Wendell Horton Jr., Sadruddin Benkadda
The promise of a vast and clean source of thermal power drove physics research for over fifty years and has finally come to collimation with the international consortium led by the European Union and Japan, with an agreement from seven countries to build a definitive test of fusion power in ITER. It happened because scientists since the Manhattan project have envisioned controlled nuclear fusion in obtaining energy with no carbon dioxide emissions and no toxic nuclear waste products. This large toroidal magnetic confinement ITER machine is described from confinement process to advanced physics of plasma-wall interactions, where pulses erupt from core plasma blistering the machine walls. Emissions from the walls reduce the core temperature which must remain ten times hotter than the 15 million degree core solar temperature to maintain ITER fusion power. The huge temperature gradient from core to wall that drives intense plasma turbulence is described in detail. Also explained are the methods designed to limit the growth of small magnetic islands, the growth of edge localized plasma plumes and the solid state physics limits of the stainless steel walls of the confinement vessel from the burning plasma. Designs of the wall coatings and the special "exhaust pipe" for spent hot plasma are provided in two chapters. And the issues associated with high-energy neutrons — about 10 times higher than in fission reactions — and how they are managed in ITER, are detailed.Readership: For nuclear fusion and ITER specialists.
Book

Self-Organization of Hot Plasmas: The Canonical Profile Transport Model

Yu.N. Dnestrovskij
In this monograph the author presents the Canonical Profile Transport Model or CPTM as a rather general mathematical framework to simulate plasma discharges.The description of hot plasmas in a magnetic fusion device is a very challenging task and many plasma properties still lack a physical explanation. One important property is plasma self-organization.It is very well known from experiments that the radial profile of the plasma pressure and temperature remains rather unaffected by changes of the deposited power or plasma density. The attractiveness of the CPTM is that it includes the effect of self-organization in the mathematical model without having to recur to particular physical mechanisms.The CPTM model contains one dimensional transport equations for ion and electron temperatures, plasma density and toroidal rotation velocity. These equations are well established and in fact are essentially a reformulation the laws of energy, particle and momentum conservation. But the expressions for the energy and particle fluxes, including certain critical gradients, are new. These critical gradients can be determined using the concept of canonical profiles for the first time formulated in great detail in the book. This concept represents a totally new approach to the description of transport in plasmas. Mathematically, the canonical profiles are formulated as a variational problem. To describe the temporal evolution of the plasma profiles, the Euler equation defining the canonical profiles is solved together with the transport equations at each time step. The author shows that in this way it is possible to describe very different operational scenarios in tokamaks (L-Mode, H-Mode, Advanced Modes, Radiating Improved Modes etc…), using one unique principle.The author illustrates the application of this principle to the simulation of plasmas on leading tokamak devices in the world (JET, MAST, T-10, DIII-D, ASDEX-U, JT-60U). In all cases the small differences between the calculated profiles for the ion and electron temperatures and the experimental is rather confirm the validity of the CPTM. In addition, the model also describes the temperature and density pedestals in the H-mode and non steady-state regimes with current and density ramp up. The proposed model therefore provides a very useful mathematical tool for the analysis of experimental results and for the prediction of plasma parameters in future experiments.
Book

The Theory of Toroidally Confined Plasmas

Roscoe B White
This graduate level textbook develops the theory of magnetically confined plasma, with the aim of bringing the reader to the level of current research in the field of thermonuclear fusion. It begins with the basic concepts of magnetic field description, plasma equilibria and stability, and goes on to derive the equations for guiding center particle motion in an equilibrium field. Topics include linear and nonlinear ideal and resistive modes and particle transport. It is of use to workers in the field of fusion both for its wide-ranging account of tokamak physics and as a kind of handbook or formulary.This edition has been extended in a number of ways. The material on mode-particle interactions has been reformulated and much new information added, including methodology for Monte Carlo implementation of mode destabilization. These results give explicit means of carrying out mode destabilization analysis, in particular for the dangerous fishbone mode. A new chapter on cyclotron motion in toroidal geometry has been added, with comparisons of the analysis of resonances using guiding center results. A new chapter on the use of lithium lined walls has been added, a promising means of lowering the complexity and cost of full scale fusion reactors. A section on nonlocal transport has been added, including an analysis of Levy flight simulations of ion transport in the reversed field pinch in Padova, RFX.Readership: Graduate students and researchers in the field of thermonuclear fusion.
Book

Magnetic Stochasticity in Magnetically Confined Fusion Plasmas (Springer Series on Atomic, Optical, and Plasma Physics)

Sadrilla Abdullaev
This is the first book to systematically consider the modern aspects of chaotic dynamics of magnetic field lines and charged particles in magnetically confined fusion plasmas. The analytical models describing the generic features of equilibrium magnetic fields and magnetic perturbations in modern fusion devices are presented. It describes mathematical and physical aspects of onset of chaos, generic properties of the structure of stochastic magnetic fields, transport of charged particles in tokamaks induced by magnetic perturbations, new aspects of particle turbulent transport, etc. The presentation is based on the classical and new unique mathematical tools of Hamiltonian dynamics, like the action--angle formalism, classical perturbation theory, canonical transformations of variables, symplectic mappings, the Poincaré-Melnikov integrals. They are extensively used for analytical studies as well as for numerical simulations of magnetic field lines, particle dynamics, their spatial structures and statistical properties. The numerous references to articles on the latest development in the area are provided. The book is intended for graduate students and researchers who interested in the modern problems of magnetic stochasticity in magnetically confined fusion plasmas. It is also useful for physicists and mathematicians interested in new methods of Hamiltonian dynamics and their applications.