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  • Test facility | How do electronics react to magnetic fields?

    A tokamak is basically a magnetic cage designed to confine, shape and control the super-hot plasmas that make fusion reactions possible. Inside the ITER Tokamak [...]

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  • ITER Robots | No two alike

    More than 500 students took part in the latest ITER Robots challenge. Working from the same instructions and technical specifications, they had worked in teams [...]

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    To accommodate the first real-time system integrated with the ITER control system, new components of the data archiving system have been deployed. Data archivi [...]

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    Like in a game of musical chairs—albeit in slow motion and at a massive scale—components in the Assembly Hall are being transferred from one location to another [...]

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  • Image of the week | There is life on Planet ITER

    Dated April 2023, this new image of the ITER "planet" places the construction site squarely in the middle. One kilometre long, 400 metres wide, the IT [...]

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Of Interest

See archived entries

Hot times for fusion plasmas

Fusion plasmas make the front cover of the latest issue of Physics Today (October 2015). (Click to view larger version...)
Fusion plasmas make the front cover of the latest issue of Physics Today (October 2015).
In the October issue of Physics Today, three US researchers
report on recent advances in the understanding of wave-particle physics in tokamaks.

In fusion plasmas, interactions between electromagnetic waves and the most energetic ions can perturb ion orbits enough to expel them from the confining magnetic field, resulting in loss of performance. A better understanding of energetic ion behavior in tokamaks is needed to predict and produce the operating parameters required for a fusion reactor.

Based on experiments and simulations of wave-induced ion transport, researchers David Pace (General Atomics), Bill Heidbrink (University of California, Irvine) and Michael Van Zeeland (General Atomics) have supplied new details on the process. Continued development of wave-particle physics will arm researchers with the ability to predict, and then avoid or mitigate, scenarios at ITER in which alpha particles are transported out of their confined orbits in the plasma.

Read the full article at AIP Scitation.
A pdf version of the article can also be downloaded from the General Atomics website.


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