Day 2 and 3 of 5: Plasma Crash Course
Sorry I didn't post anything yesterday. It's hard to be productive in this sauna-like building. At least last night I only sweated through half the night. The thunderstorm seemed to cool down everything. We did have an interesting dinner last night, however. Since the Princeton dining halls have, for some reason, shut down this week, the Department of Energy has been footing the bill for our recent dinners. They ordered 24 pizzas for 30 people (the NUF and SULI programs combined). And tonight we got tons and tons of pasta. Since the PPPL takes care of our breakfast and lunch, we have more food than we know what to do with at the dorm. Food is always a luxury, no matter how bad we wish for AC.
Today we took a tour of the lab and saw all the major current projects going on. In my experience, I have only seen university standard labs. It's amazing what machines one can build and what progress one can have when the budget is in the billions. I also got to meet my research mentor today. Dr. Rajesh Maingi has three degrees from NC State, believe it or not, and his title reads ?Distinguished Researcher?. So naturally we already have some things in common. (Well, maybe someday ?distinguished? will be part of my title.) Dr. Maingi showed me where my office, the gym, and, most importantly, the coffee pots were all located. Basically for now I will just be learning IDL (the programming language I will be using) until next week, when the lectures are finished and the real research begins.
Now I will summarize an even more brief version of my notes from yesterday.
Computational Plasma Physics ? Bill Dorland, University of Maryland
Dorland showed various slides and animations resulting from simulations attempting to model the turbulence in plasma, whether it be astrophysical or in the NSTX (spherical tokamak). He discussed his method of modeling physical phenomena and some data layering tricks in modeling the plasma flow in toroidal tokamak. What was really interesting was the future in modeling plasma may come from parallelizing video game consoles to make computations even faster. It's amazing how much effort has been put into ?blood spattering? physics in video game designs. Now this technology may be used for some really advanced physics!
Magnetic Reconnection ? Jan Egedal, MIT
Egedal's talk was mainly on his experiments at MIT on magnetic reconnection: how his device works and what he and his collegues were able to produce. Magnetic reconnection is a phenomena when two antiparallel magnetic field lines are squeezed together until they intersect, causing them to ?pinch off?, they separate and reconnect with part of the other field line. Think of when you squeeze the middle of a balloon, except when you squeeze to the middle of the balloon, it seals off both sides and separates.
Z-pinch ? Mark Herrmann, Sandia National Laboratories
Z-pinch is mainly an inertial attempt to fusion. They ramp up a magnetic field really high and really fast so that a cylinder of copper wires implodes on itself and the material to be fused. This process would not be a continuous burn of plasma, but rather separate, quick bursts (explosions) of energy. It costs $100,000 each time they want to blow up one tiny piece of fusion material.
Introduction to Plasma ? Greg Hammett, PPPL
I don't know why they gave us this lecture so late in the week. It seems like it would make sense to do this lecture first... It was nice to have a review of basic material.
Posted at 11:51PM Jun 11, 2008 by jlbarton in General | Comments[0]