Credit Hours:3-0-3
Prerequisites:Graduate standing in engineering or a related discipline
Catalog Description:Physics of ionized plasmas. Magnetic confinement, kinetic and fluid theories, equilibrium, waves and stability, plasma-material interactions, atomic/molecular-plasma interactions, and multispecies transport. Plasma processing applications.
Instructors:W. M. Stacey
Goals:This course is intended to introduce the student to the fundamental principles, phenomena and methodologies of the physics of fully and partially ionized plasmas in magnetic fields.
Topics:
  1. Fundamentals: (plasma approximation and definition of plasma, Coulomb collisions, review of E&M)
  2. Motion of Charged Particles in Magnetic Field: (gyromotion, drifts, adiabatic invariants, confinement in magnetic wells, toroidal confinement)
  3. Plasma Kinetic Theory: (Boltzman and Vlasov equations, drift kinetic approximation, Fokker-Planck approximation, derivation of fluid approximation)
  4. Plasma Equilibria : (general properties, toroidal equilibria, flux surface coordinates, magnetic field diffusion)
  5. Transport Theory: (neoclassical and collective turbulent transport)
  6. Plasma Waves: (waves in cold plasma, Langmuir waves and Landau damping, Vlasov theory, electrostatic waves)
  7. Plasma Stability: (general principles, hydromagnetic instabilities, energy principle, pinch and kink instabilities, interchange instabilities, resistive instabilities, drift wave instabilities, loss-cone and drift-cone instabilities)
  8. Plasma Heating & Current Drive: (resistive heating, adiabatic compression, neutral beam injection, radiofrequency and microwave injection, non-inductive current drive, alpha heating)
  9. Radiation from a Plasma: (radiation fields, bremsstrahlung, cyclotron radiation, impurity radiation)
  10. Plasma-Materials Interactions: (plasma sheath, physical and chemical sputtering, reflection)
  11. Atomic/Molecular-Plasma Interactions:(atomic and molecular processes in plasmas)
  12. Transport in Partially-ionized Plasmas: (multispecies plasma and atom/molecule transport methods)