To date, the most effective way to confine a plasma magnetically is to use a toroidal, or doughnut-shaped, device called a tokamak pictured in this schematic. (Image courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Fusion Energy Sciences.)
Instructor(s)
Prof. Kim Molvig
MIT Course Number
22.616
As Taught In
Fall 2003
Level
Graduate
Course Description
Course Features
Course Description
This course describes the processes by which mass, momentum, and energy are transported in plasmas, with special reference to magnetic confinement fusion applications.
The Fokker-Planck collision operator and its limiting forms, as well as collisional relaxation and equilibrium, are considered in detail. Special applications include a Lorentz gas, Brownian motion, alpha particles, and runaway electrons.
The Braginskii formulation of classical collisional transport in general geometry based on the Fokker-Planck equation is presented.
Neoclassical transport in tokamaks, which is sensitive to the details of the magnetic geometry, is considered in the high (Pfirsch-Schluter), low (banana) and intermediate (plateau) regimes of collisionality.