Researchers led by Chang Liu of PPPL have unveiled a promising approach to mitigating damaging runaway electrons created by disruptions in tokamak fusion devices. Key to the approach was harnessing a unique type of plasma wave that bears the name of astrophysicist Hannes Alfvén, a 1970 Nobel laureate.
reactors, allowing some to escape and reducing the efficiency of the doughnut-shaped devices. However, the new findings by Chang Liu and researchers at General Atomics, Columbia University and PPPL uncovered beneficial results in the case of runaway electrons.The scientists found that such loosening can diffuse or scatter high-energy electrons before they can grow into avalanches that damage tokamak components.
Researchers derived a theory for the remarkable circularity of these interactions. The results aligned well with runaways in experiments on the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, a DOE tokamak that General Atomics operates for the Office of Science. Tests of the theory also proved positive on the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
"Chang Liu's work shows that the runaway electron population size can be controlled by instabilities driven by the runaway electrons themselves," said Felix Parra Diaz, head of the Theory Department at PPPL."His research is very exciting because it might lead to tokamak designs that naturally mitigate runaway electron damage through inherent instabilities.".
Fusion reactions combine light elements in the form of plasma—the hot, charged state of matter composed of
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