Plasma Physics Examples and Fusion Related Sites

PRINCIPLES

Nuclear Fusion

Energy Sources & Conversion
Two Important Fusion Reactions
How Fusion Reactions Work
Creating the Conditions for Fusion
Plasmas - the Fourth State of Matter
Achieving Fusion Conditions

Magnetic confinement

Fusion Energy

 

EXPERIMENTS

Tokamaks

JET -- Joint European Torus (Culham, UK)
Now the largest magnetic fusion device in the world.

Sketch of the tokamak, pictures from outside and inside the machine
Sound from low frequency (Alfven and MHD) instabilities.

Alcator C-MOD (MIT, USA)
High magnetic field, high density.

 Album

MAST -- Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak (Culham, UK)
Follows START which paved the way for ST; MAST becomes operational later this year.

Picture  and movie of a spherical plasma discharge in START

NSTX -- National Spherical Torus Experiment (Princeton, USA)
American version of a mega-ampere spherical tokamak.

 

TCV -- Tokamak (Lausanne, Switzerland)
Studies strongly shaped plasmas.

Parameters , shaped plasma , diagnostics , movie of a shot at 280kA

ITER -- International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor
Has been redesigned to reduce the cost down to ~4 bn US$.
Several countries now examine the possibility of hosting the experiment (France, Canada, Japan).

Stellarators, Heliacs, etc

Wendelstein 7-X (Greifswald, Germany)
Largest stellarator currently under construction.

TJII Heliac (Madrid, Spain)
Became operational last year.

Reversed Field Pinch

Extrap--T2 (Stockholm, Sweden)
The Swedish fusion experiment, currently being rebuilt with a different vessel.

Movie of an instability

Inertial Confinement

NOVA (LLNL, USA)
The largest laser currently in operation.

NIF -- National Ignition Facility (LLNL, USA)
Currently under construction; will probably soon reach breakeven Q>1.

Inertial fusion , brochure , maintain and develop H-bombs

Basic Plasma Physics Experiments

MDX -- Madison Dynamo Experiment (Madison, USA)
Study the phenomenon which could be behind the earth magnetic field.

MRX -- Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (Princeton, USA)
VTF -- Versatile Toroidal Facility (MIT, USA)
Both study the phenomenon which could explain the heat on the surface of the sun.
 

From outer space

The Solar system
The Sun  -- A Multimedia tour
Images of the Sun
Solar Images of the Learmonth Solar Observatory
Aurora -- Space Shuttle and satellite images
Aurora -- Images taken in and around Fairbanks, Alaska

THEORY AND COMPUTATIONS

Stability

MHD-, Alfvén- and micro- instabilities (CRPP, Switzerland)
MHD Phenomena in tokamaks and stellarators (ORNL, USA)
MHD computations in advanced tokamaks (Chalmers Inst. Tech., Sweden)
Stability of Alfvén eigenmodes (Alfvén Laboratory, Sweden)
Non-linear MHD with some non-ideal effects NIMROD (DOE, USA)

Heating

Ion-ion hybrid scenario in the DIII-D tokamak (Alfvén Laboratory, Sweden)

Transport

Gyrofluid turbulence (PPPL, USA)
Numerical tokamak project (World wide effort)
Drift wave stability, turbulence and transport in tokamaks (Chalmers Inst. Tech., Sweden)
Random walk / diffusion applet
 

OTHER SITES WORTH CHECKING