ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
Latest Magazine Issues
Oct 2025
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
November 2025
Nuclear Technology
October 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Russia withdraws from 25-year-old weapons-grade plutonium agreement
Russia’s lower house of Parliament, the State Duma, approved a measure to withdraw from a 25-year-old agreement with the United States to cut back on the leftover plutonium from Cold War–era nuclear weapons.
Taha Houssine Zerguini
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 1 | July 1983 | Pages 54-63
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22774
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Sloshing ion distributions are a crucial feature in the end cells of recent tandem mirror reactor designs. They provide the ambipolar potentials that confine central ions and often have the function of making the electron thermal barrier with a potential shape that traps enough cold ions at the midplane for the stabilization of loss cone modes. A perturbation method is developed to find solutions of sloshing-ion distributions. This method uses an expansion in the ratio of electrostatic potential to average ion energy to simplify the bounce-averaged Fokker-Planck equation. The zero'th order equation obtained is separated into equations for the angular and velocity-dependent parts of the distribution function. An analytical solution of the angular equation is derived for small charge-exchange to ionization ratios. For any value of this ratio finite element techniques, which provide rapid numerical solutions for parametric studies of sloshing ions, are used to derive the angular and the velocity distribution functions. The density ratio and the ambipolar potential, as functions of axial distance, are computed from the angular distribution function. There is excellent agreement with results from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory bounce-averaged Fokker-Planck code with as much as 500 times less CRAY-1 computer time.