Colloquium : Plamen Ivanov
On Tuesday, February 4, from 14:00 to 15:00 in Abreu Faro Auditorium, Plamen Ivanov (Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics University of Oxford, UK) will present a Colloquium as invitee of the scientific area of Plasmas Physics, Lasers and Nuclear Fusion.
Plasma turbulence in magnetised-fusion devices
With hydrogen fuel that is ubiquitous on Earth (and beyond) and little to no dangerous waste, fusion’s promise to satiate humanity’s ever-growing energy demands may sound too good to be true. And it certainly would have been so were it not for the exotic conditions it requires: nuclear fusion becomes a viable source of energy only when the fuel (typically hydrogen) is heated up to well above one hundred million degrees Celsius. At these temperatures, the fuel turns into a plasma — and plasma can be manipulated by magnetic and electric fields. This is precisely the idea behind the magnetic-confinement approach to fusion: trap hydrogen plasma in a magnetic cage, then heat it enough for fusion to take place.
However, heating it is the easy part; the hard one is making sure that the plasma is insulated enough from its environment so that the heat generated by the fusion processes is sufficient to maintain the plasma temperature. Sadly for the fusion programme, thermal conduction in such plasmas is dominated by turbulence — a chaotic and unpredictable mess of fluctuations. In this talk, we will discuss some of the basic features of turbulent fluctuations in magnetised-fusion plasmas, how we study them and what we have learnt over many decades of experimental and theoretical work. We will also highlight some recent results regarding electromagnetic fluctuations that challenge many traditional beliefs and clearly demonstrate that there is much we need to learn before fusion energy becomes a reality.
All are invited to attend
