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Playing the “bad guy” to enhance next-generation safety
Sometimes, cops and robbers is more than just a kid’s game. At the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, researchers are channeling their inner saboteurs to discover vulnerabilities in next-generation nuclear reactors, making sure that they’re as safe as possible before they’re even constructed.
R. Koch
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 45 | Number 2 | March 2004 | Pages 193-202
Technical Paper | Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics - Plasma Heating and Current Drive | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A483
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This lecture complements the three previous lectures1,2,3 on waves by addressing, on the basis of elementary and intuitive treatment, the process of coupling of electromagnetic power to plasma. Coupling is here meant in a broad sense. It consists of four different steps. (i) The first one is the coupling of vacuum electromagnetic power to plasma waves. An elementary antenna coupling theory is given. The state of the art in coupling models and status of comparisons with experiments are briefly discussed. (ii) The second is the transfer of plasma wave energy to particle energy. The resonant processes leading to this transfer are described in a heuristic way. (iii) The third one is the build-up of fast particle populations. It will be outlined through a sketch of quasilinear diffusion for the simple case of Landau damping. (iv) The last step is the conversion of power through the resonant particle population to bulk plasma heating by collisions, which will be briefly addressed.