Giant structures called plasmoids could simplify the design of future tokamaks (Physical Review Letters)

Posted on by Catherine Zandonella
Plasmoid formation in plasma simulation
Left: Plasmoid formation in simulation of NSTX plasma during CHI. Credit: Fatima Ebrahimi, PPPL / Right: Fast-camera image of NSTX plasma shows two discrete plasmoid-like bubble structures. Credit: Nishino-san, Hiroshima University

By Raphael Rosen, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have for the first time simulated the formation of structures called “plasmoids” during Coaxial Helicity Injection (CHI), a process that could simplify the design of fusion facilities known as tokamaks. The findings, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, involve the formation of plasmoids in the hot, charged plasma gas that fuels fusion reactions. These round structures carry current that could eliminate the need for solenoids – large magnetic coils that wind down the center of today’s tokamaks – to initiate the plasma and complete the magnetic field that confines the hot gas.

“Understanding this behavior will help us produce plasmas that undergo fusion reactions indefinitely,” said Fatima Ebrahimi, a physicist at both Princeton University and PPPL, and the paper’s lead author.

Ebrahimi ran a computer simulation that modeled the behavior of plasma and the formation of plasmoids in three dimensions thoughout a tokamak’s vacuum vessel. This marked the first time researchers had modeled plasmoids in conditions that closely mimicked those within an actual tokamak. All previous simulations had modeled only a thin slice of the plasma – a simplified picture that could fail to capture the full range of plasma behavior.

Researchers validated their model by comparing it with fast-camera images of plasma behavior inside the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX), PPPL’s major fusion facility. These images also showed plasmoid-like structures, confirming the simulation and giving the research breakthrough significance, since it revealed the existence of plasmoids in an environment in which they had never been seen before. “These findings are in a whole different league from previous ones,” said Roger Raman, leader for the Coaxial Helicity Injection Research program on NSTX and a coauthor of the paper.

The findings may provide theoretical support for the design of a new kind of tokamak with no need for a large solenoid to complete the magnetic field. Solenoids create magnetic fields when electric current courses through them in relatively short pulses. Today’s conventional tokamaks, which are shaped like a donut, and spherical tokamaks, which are shaped like a cored apple, both employ solenoids. But future tokamaks will need to operate in a constant or steady state for weeks or months at a time. Moreover, the space in which the solenoid fits – the hole in the middle of the doughnut-shaped tokamak – is relatively small and limits the size and strength of the solenoid.

A clear understanding of plasmoid formation could thus lead to a more efficient method of creating and maintaining a plasma through transient Coaxial Helicity Injection. This method, originally developed at the University of Washington, could dispense with a solenoid entirely and would work like this:

  • Researchers first inject open magnetic field lines into the vessel from the bottom of the vacuum chamber. As researchers drive electric current along those magnetic lines, the lines snap closed and form the plasmoids, much like soap bubbles being blown out of a sheet of soapy film.
  • The many plasmoids would then merge to form one giant plasmoid that could fill the vacuum chamber.
  • The magnetic field within this giant plasmoid would induce a current in the plasma to keep the gas tightly in place. “In principle, CHI could fundamentally change how tokamaks are built in the future,” says Raman.

Understanding how the magnetic lines in plasmoids snap closed could also help solar physicists decode the workings of the sun. Huge magnetic lines regularly loop off the surface of the star, bringing the sun’s hot plasma with them. These lines sometimes snap together to form a plasmoid-like mass that can interfere with communications satellites when it collides with the magnetic field that surrounds the Earth.

While Ebrahimi’s findings are promising, she stresses that much more is to come. PPPL’s National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U) will provide a more powerful platform for studying plasmoids when it begins operating this year, making Ebrahimi’s research “only the beginning of even more exciting work that will be done on PPPL equipment,” she said.

PPPL, on Princeton University’s Forrestal Campus in Plainsboro, N.J., is devoted to creating new knowledge about the physics of plasmas — ultra-hot, charged gases — and to developing practical solutions for the creation of fusion energy. Results of PPPL research have ranged from a portable nuclear materials detector for anti-terrorist use to universally employed computer codes for analyzing and predicting the outcome of fusion experiments. The Laboratory is managed by the University for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which is the largest single supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

Read the abstract

Ebrahimi and R. Raman. “Plasmoids Formation During Simulations of Coaxial Helicity Injection in the National Spherical Torus Experiment. Physical Review Letters. Published May 20, 2015. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.205003

Scientists make breakthrough in understanding how to control intense heat bursts in fusion experiments (Physical Review Letters)

Posted on by Catherine Zandonella
Computer simulation
Computer simulation of a cross-section of a DIII-D plasma responding to tiny magnetic fields. The left image models the response that suppressed the ELMs while the right image shows a response that was ineffective. Simulation by General Atomics.

By Raphael Rosen, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

Researchers from General Atomics and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have made a major breakthrough in understanding how potentially damaging heat bursts inside a fusion reactor can be controlled. Scientists performed the experiments on the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, a tokamak operated by General Atomics in San Diego. The findings represent a key step in predicting how to control heat bursts in future fusion facilities including ITER, an international experiment under construction in France to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion energy. This work is supported by the DOE Office of Science (Fusion Energy Sciences).

The studies build upon previous work pioneered on DIII-D showing that these intense heat bursts – called “ELMs” for short – could be suppressed with tiny magnetic fields. These tiny fields cause the edge of the plasma to smoothly release heat, thereby avoiding the damaging heat bursts. But until now, scientists did not understand how these fields worked. “Many mysteries surrounded how the plasma distorts to suppress these heat bursts,” said Carlos Paz-Soldan, a General Atomics scientist and lead author of the first of the two papers that report the seminal findings back-to-back in the March 12 issue of Physical Review Letters.

Paz-Soldan and a multi-institutional team of researchers found that tiny magnetic fields applied to the device can create two distinct kinds of response, rather than just one response as previously thought. The new response produces a ripple in the magnetic field near the plasma edge, allowing more heat to leak out at just the right rate to avert the intense heat bursts. Researchers applied the magnetic fields by running electrical current through coils around the plasma. Pickup coils then detected the plasma response, much as the microphone on a guitar picks up string vibrations.

The second result, led by PPPL scientist Raffi Nazikian, who heads the PPPL research team at DIII-D, identified the changes in the plasma that lead to the suppression of the large edge heat bursts or ELMs. The team found clear evidence that the plasma was deforming in just the way needed to allow the heat to slowly leak out. The measured magnetic distortions of the plasma edge indicated that the magnetic field was gently tearing in a narrow layer, a key prediction for how heat bursts can be prevented.  “The configuration changes suddenly when the plasma is tapped in a certain way,” Nazikian said, “and it is this response that suppresses the ELMs.”

Paz-Soldan and Nazikian
Carlos Paz-Soldan, left, and Raffi Nazikian at the DIII-D tokamak. (Photo by Lisa Petrillo/General Atomics)

The work involved a multi-institutional team of researchers who for years have been working toward an understanding of this process. These researchers included people from General Atomics, PPPL, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Columbia University, Australian National University, the University of California-San Diego, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and several others.

The new results suggest further possibilities for tuning the magnetic fields to make ELM-control easier. These findings point the way to overcoming a persistent barrier to sustained fusion reactions. “The identification of the physical processes that lead to ELM suppression when applying a small 3D magnetic field to the inherently 2D tokamak field provides new confidence that such a technique can be optimized in eliminating ELMs in ITER and future fusion devices,” said Mickey Wade, the DIII-D program director.

The results further highlight the value of the long-term multi-institutional collaboration between General Atomics, PPPL and other institutions in DIII-D research. This collaboration, said Wade, “was instrumental in developing the best experiment possible, realizing the significance of the results, and carrying out the analysis that led to publication of these important findings.”

PPPL, on Princeton University’s Forrestal Campus in Plainsboro, N.J., is devoted to creating new knowledge about the physics of plasmas — ultra-hot, charged gases — and to developing practical solutions for the creation of fusion energy. The Laboratory is managed by the University for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which is the largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

General Atomics has participated in fusion research for over 50 years and presently operates the DIII-D National Fusion Facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science with a mission “to provide the physics basis for the optimization of the tokamak approach to fusion energy production.”  The General Atomics group of companies is a world renowned leader in developing high-technology systems ranging from the nuclear fuel cycle to electromagnetic systems; remotely operated surveillance aircraft; airborne sensors; advanced electronic, wireless, and laser technologies; and biofuels.

Read the articles:

C. Paz-Soldan, R. Nazikian, S. R. Haskey, N. C. Logan, E. J. Strait, N. M. Ferraro, J. M. Hanson, J. D. King, M. J. Lanctot, R. A. Moyer, M. Okabayashi, J-K. Park, M. W. Shafer, and B. J. Tobias. Observation of a Multimode Plasma Response and its Relationship to Density Pumpout and Edge-Localized Mode Suppression. Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 105001 – Published 12 March 2015.

R. Nazikian, C. Paz-Soldan, J. D. Callen, J. S. deGrassie, D. Eldon, T. E. Evans, N. M. Ferraro, B. A. Grierson, R. J. Groebner, S. R. Haskey, C. C. Hegna, J. D. King, N. C. Logan, G. R. McKee, R. A. Moyer, M. Okabayashi, D. M. Orlov, T. H. Osborne, J-K. Park, T. L. Rhodes, M. W. Shafer, P. B. Snyder, W. M. Solomon, E. J. Strait, and M. R. Wade. Pedestal Bifurcation and Resonant Field Penetration at the Threshold of Edge-Localized Mode Suppression in the DIII-D Tokamak. Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 105002 – Published 12 March 2015.

 

 

 

 

PPPL scientists take key step toward solving a major astrophysical mystery

Posted on by Catherine Zandonella

By John Greenwald, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

Magnetic reconnection in the Earth and sun’s atmospheres can trigger geomagnetic storms that disrupt cell phone service, damage satellites and blackout power grids. Understanding how reconnection transforms magnetic energy into explosive particle energy has been a major unsolved problem in plasma astrophysics.

Scientists at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University have taken a key step toward a solution, as described in a paper published this week in the journal Nature Communications. In research conducted on the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (MRX) at PPPL, the scientists not only identified how the mysterious transformation takes place, but measured experimentally the amount of magnetic energy that turns into particle energy. The work is supported by the U. S. Department of Energy as well as the NSF-funded Center for Magnetic Self-Organization.

Fast-camera image of plasma during magnetic reconnection with rendering of the field lines, shown in white, based on measurements made during the experiment. The converging horizontal lines represent the field lines prior to reconnection. The outgoing vertical lines represent the field lines after reconnection. Image courtesy of Jongsoo Yoo.
Fast-camera image of plasma during magnetic reconnection with rendering of the field lines, shown in white, based on measurements made during the experiment. The converging horizontal lines represent the field lines prior to reconnection. The outgoing vertical lines represent the field lines after reconnection. Image courtesy of Jongsoo Yoo.

Magnetic field lines represent the direction, and indicate the shape, of magnetic fields. In magnetic reconnection, the magnetic field lines in plasma snap apart and violently reconnect. The MRX, built in 1995, allows researchers to study the process in a controlled laboratory environment.

The new research shows that reconnection converts about 50 percent of the magnetic energy, with one-third of the conversion heating the electrons and two-thirds accelerating the ions — or atomic nuclei — in the plasma. In large bodies like the sun, such converted energy can equal the power of millions of tons of TNT.

“This is a major milestone for our research,” said Masaaki Yamada, a research physicist, the principal investigator for the MRX and first author of the Nature Communications paper. “We can now see the entire picture of how much of the energy goes to the electrons and how much to the ions in a proto-typical reconnection layer.”

The findings also suggested the process by which the energy conversion occurs. Reconnection first propels and energizes the electrons, according to the researchers, and this creates an electrically charged field that “becomes the primary energy source for the ions,” said Jongsoo Yoo, an associate research physicist at PPPL and co-author of the paper.

The other contributors to the paper were Hantao Ji, professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton; Russell Kulsrud, professor of astrophysical sciences, emeritus, at Princeton; and doctoral candidates in astrophysical sciences Jonathan Jara-Almonte and Clayton Myers.

If confirmed by data from space explorations, the PPPL results could help resolve decades-long questions and create practical benefits. These could include a better understanding of geomagnetic storms that could lead to advanced warning of the disturbances and an improved ability to cope with them. Researchers could shut down sensitive instruments on communications satellites, for example, to protect the instruments from harm.

Next year NASA plans to launch a four-satellite mission to study reconnection in the magnetosphere — the magnetic field that surrounds the Earth. The PPPL team plans to collaborate with the venture, called the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Mission, by providing MRX data to it. The MMS probes could help to confirm the laboratory’s findings.

PPPL, on Princeton University’s Forrestal Campus in Plainsboro, New Jersey, is devoted to creating new knowledge about the physics of plasmas — ultra-hot, charged gases — and to developing practical solutions for the creation of fusion energy. Fusion takes place when atomic nuclei fuse and release a burst of energy. This compares with the fission reactions in today’s nuclear power plants, which operate by splitting atoms apart.

Results of PPPL research have ranged from a portable nuclear materials detector for anti-terrorist use to universally employed computer codes for analyzing and predicting the outcome of fusion experiments. The laboratory is managed by the University for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Read the abstract.

Yamada, M; Yoo J.; Jara-Almonte, J.; Ji, H.; Kulsrud, R.M.; Myers, C.E. Conversion of magnetic energy in the magnetic reconnection layer of a laboratory plasma. Nature Communications. Article published online Sept. 10, 2014. DOI: NCOMMS5774

 

A farewell to arms? Scientists developing a novel technique that could facilitate nuclear disarmament (Nature)

Posted on by Catherine Zandonella
Alexander Glaser and Robert Goldston
Alexander Glaser and Robert Goldston with the British Test Object. Credit: Elle Starkman/PPPL Communications Office

By John Greenwald, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory Office of Communications

A proven system for verifying that apparent nuclear weapons slated to be dismantled contained true warheads could provide a key step toward the further reduction of nuclear arms. The system would achieve this verification while safeguarding classified information that could lead to nuclear proliferation.

Scientists at Princeton University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) are developing the prototype for such a system, as reported this week in the journal Nature. Their novel approach, called a “zero-knowledge protocol,” would verify the presence of warheads without collecting any classified information at all.

“The goal is to prove with as high confidence as required that an object is a true nuclear warhead while learning nothing about the materials and design of the warhead itself,” said physicist Robert Goldston, coauthor of the paper, a fusion researcher and former director of PPPL, and a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton.

While numerous efforts have been made over the years to develop systems for verifying the actual content of warheads covered by disarmament treaties, no such methods are currently in use for treaty verification.

Traditional nuclear arms negotiations focus instead on the reduction of strategic — or long-range — delivery systems, such as bombers, submarines and ballistic missiles, without verifying their warheads. But this approach could prove insufficient when future talks turn to tactical and nondeployed nuclear weapons that are not on long-range systems. “What we really want to do is count warheads,” said physicist Alexander Glaser, first author of the paper and an assistant professor in Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

The system Glaser and Goldston are mapping out would compare a warhead to be inspected with a known true warhead to see if the weapons matched. This would be done by beaming high-energy neutrons into each warhead and recording how many neutrons passed through to detectors positioned on the other side. Neutrons that passed through would be added to those already “preloaded” into the detectors by the warheads’ owner — and if the total number of neutrons were the same for each warhead, the weapons would be found to match. But different totals would show that the putative warhead was really a spoof. Prior to the test, the inspector would decide which preloaded detector would go with which warhead.

No classified data would be measured in this process, and no electronic components that might be vulnerable to tampering and snooping would be used. “This approach really is very interesting and elegant,” said Steve Fetter, a professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and a former White House official. “The main question is whether it can be implemented in practice.”

A project to test this approach is under construction at PPPL. The project calls for firing high-energy neutrons at a non-nuclear target, called a British Test Object, that will serve as a proxy for warheads. Researchers will compare results of the tests by noting how many neutrons pass through the target to bubble detectors that Yale University is designing for the project. The gel-filled detectors will add the neutrons that pass through to those already preloaded to produce a total for each test.

The project was launched with a seed grant from The Simons Foundation of Vancouver, Canada, that came to Princeton through Global Zero, a nonprofit organization. Support also was provided by the U.S. Department of State, the DOE (via PPPL pre-proposal development funding), and most recently, a total of $3.5 million over five years from the National Nuclear Security Administration.

Glaser hit upon the idea for a zero-knowledge proof over a lunch hosted by David Dobkin, a computer scientist, and until June 2014, dean of the Princeton faculty. “I told him I was really interested in nuclear warhead verification without learning anything about the warhead itself,” Glaser said. ‘“We call this a zero-knowledge proof in computer science,”’ Glaser said Dobkin replied. “That was the trigger,” Glaser recalled. “I went home and began reading about zero-knowledge proofs,” which are widely used in applications such as verifying online passwords.

Glaser’s reading led him to Boaz Barak, a senior researcher at Microsoft New England who had taught computer science at Princeton and is an expert in cryptology, the science of disguising secret information. “We started having discussions,” Glaser said of Barak, who helped develop statistical measures for the PPPL project and is the third coauthor of the paper in Nature.

Glaser also reached out to Goldston, with whom he had taught a class for three years in the Princeton Department of Astrophysical Sciences. “I told Rob that we need neutrons for this project,” Glaser recalled. “And he said, ‘That’s what we do — we have 14 MeV [or high-energy] neutrons at the Laboratory.’” Glaser, Goldston and Barak then worked together to refine the concept, developing ways to assure that even the statistical noise — or random variation — in the measurements conveyed no information.

If proven successful, dedicated inspection systems based on radiation measurements, such as the one proposed here, could help to advance disarmament talks beyond the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) between the United States and Russia, which runs from 2011 to 2021. The treaty calls for each country to reduce its arsenal of deployed strategic nuclear arms to 1,550 weapons, for a total of 3,100, by 2018.

Not included in the New START treaty are more than 4,000 nondeployed strategic and tactical weapons in each country’s arsenal. These very weapons, note the authors of the Nature paper, are apt to become part of future negotiations, “which will likely require verification of individual warheads, rather than whole delivery systems.” Deep cuts in the nuclear arsenals and the ultimate march to zero, say the authors, will require the ability to verifiably count individual warheads.

Read the abstract: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature13457

A.Glaser, B. Barak, R. Goldston. A zero-knowledge protocol for nuclear  warhead verification. Nature 26 June 2014 DOI: 10.1038/nature13457

A promising concept on the path to fusion energy (IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science)

Posted on by Catherine Zandonella

by John Greenwald, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

QUASAR stellerator design
QUASAR stellerator design (Source: PPPL)

Completion of a promising experimental facility at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Laboratory (PPPL) could advance the development of fusion as a clean and abundant source of energy for generating electricity, according to a PPPL paper published this month in the journal IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science.

The facility, called the Quasi-Axisymmetric Stellarator Research (QUASAR) experiment, represents the first of a new class of fusion reactors based on the innovative theory of quasi-axisymmetry, which makes it possible to design a magnetic bottle that combines the advantages of the stellarator with the more widely used tokamak design. Experiments in QUASAR would test this theory. Construction of QUASAR — originally known as the National Compact Stellarator Experiment — was begun in 2004 and halted in 2008 when costs exceeded projections after some 80 percent of the machine’s major components had been built or procured.

“This type of facility must have a place on the roadmap to fusion,” said physicist George “Hutch” Neilson, the head of the Advanced Projects Department at PPPL.

Both stellarators and tokamaks use magnetic fields to control the hot, charged plasma gas that fuels fusion reactions. While tokamaks put electric current into the plasma to complete the magnetic confinement and hold the gas together, stellarators don’t require such a current to keep the plasma bottled up. Stellarators rely instead on twisting — or 3D —magnetic fields to contain the plasma in a controlled “steady state.”

Stellarator plasmas thus run little risk of disrupting — or falling apart — as can happen in tokamaks if the internal current abruptly shuts off. Developing systems to suppress or mitigate such disruptions is a challenge that builders of tokamaks like ITER, the international fusion experiment under construction in France, must face.

Stellarators had been the main line of fusion development in the 1950s and early 1960s before taking a back seat to tokamaks, whose symmetrical, doughnut-shaped magnetic field geometry produced good plasma confinement and proved easier to create. But breakthroughs in computing and physics understanding have revitalized interest in the twisty, cruller-shaped stellarator design and made it the subject of major experiments in Japan and Germany.

PPPL developed the QUASAR facility with both stellarators and tokamaks in mind. Tokamaks produce magnetic fields and a plasma shape that are the same all the way around the axis of the machine — a feature known as “axisymmetry.” QUASAR is symmetrical too, but in a different way. While QUASAR was designed to produce a twisting and curving magnetic field, the strength of that field varies gently as in a tokamak — hence the name “quasi-symmetry” (QS) for the design.  This property of the field strength was to produce plasma confinement properties identical to those of tokamaks.

“If the predicted near-equivalence in the confinement physics can be validated experimentally,” Neilson said, “then the development of the QS line may be able to continue as essentially a ‘3D tokamak.’”

Such development would test whether a QUASAR-like design could be a candidate for a demonstration — or DEMO —fusion facility that would pave the way for construction of a commercial fusion reactor that would generate electricity for the power grid.

Read the paper.

George Neilson, David Gates, Philip Heitzenroeder, Joshua Breslau, Stewart Prager, Timothy Stevenson, Peter Titus, Michael Williams, and Michael Zarnstorff. Next Steps in Quasi-Axisymmetric Stellarator Research IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, vol. 42, No. 3, March 2014.

The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC02 09CH11466. Princeton University manages PPPL, which is part of the national laboratory system funded by the U.S. Department of Energy through the Office of Science.

New imaging technique provides improved insight into controlling the plasma in fusion experiments (Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion)

Posted on by Catherine Zandonella
Graphic of fluctuating electron temperatures
Graphic representation of 2D images of fluctuating electron temperatures in a cross-section of a confined fusion plasma. (Image source: Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion)

By John Greenwald, Office of Communications, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

A key issue for the development of fusion energy to generate electricity is the ability to confine the superhot, charged plasma gas that fuels fusion reactions in magnetic devices called tokamaks. This gas is subject to instabilities that cause it to leak from the magnetic fields and halt fusion reactions.

Now a recently developed imaging technique can help researchers improve their control of instabilities. The new technique, developed by physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), the University of California-Davis and General Atomics in San Diego, provides new insight into how the instabilities respond to externally applied magnetic fields.

This technique, called Electron Cyclotron Emission Imaging (ECEI) and successfully tested on the DIII-D tokamak at General Atomics, uses an array of detectors to produce a 2D profile of fluctuating electron temperatures within the plasma. Standard methods for diagnosing plasma temperature have long relied on a single line of sight, providing only a 1D profile. Results of the ECEI technique, recently reported in the journal Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, could enable researchers to better model the response of confined plasma to external magnetic perturbations that are applied to improve plasma stability and fusion performance.

PPPL is managed by Princeton University.

Read the abstract.

B.J. Tobias; L.Yu; C.W. Domier; N.C. Luhmann, Jr; M.E. Austin; C. Paz-Soldan; A.D. Turnbull; I.G.J. Classen; and the DIII-D Team. 2013. Boundary perturbations coupled to core 3/2 tearing modes on the DIII-D tokamak. Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion. Article first published online: July 5, 2013. DOI:10.1088/0741-3335/55/9/095006

This work was supported in part by the US Department of Energy under DE-AC02- 09CH11466, DE-FG02-99ER54531, DE-FG03-97ER54415, DE-AC05-00OR23100, DE- FC02-04ER54698, and DE-FG02-95ER54309.