This award is made in response to a proposal submitted to and reviewed under the NSF/DoE Partnership in Basic Plasma Science and Engineering joint solicitation NSF 08-589. The award provides funds to support undergraduate participation in the overall research effort, which is being funded separately by the DoE under contract to UC-Irvine (Grant DE-FG02-03ER54720)
A test-particle experiment is planned to study the transport of fast ions by microturbulence. Drift-Alfven turbulence will be created by drawing electron current to a biased disk. The fast-ion orbit will traverse the sharp density-gradient region, where the fluctuation amplitude is largest. The pitch angle and energy of the beam will be varied to study the dependence of fast-ion transport on energy. The results will be compared with gyrokinetic simulations of the expected transport. Other experiments with the lithium source will revisit the Doppler-shifted cyclotron resonance with shear Alfven waves at larger wave amplitudes, where nonlinear effects will become important. In addition to these studies, Professor Heidbrink coordinates the fast-ion "campaign" at the Large Plasma Device (LAPD), an NSF-DoE supported user facility. This campaign promotes communication between the fusion, space, and basic plasma physics communities and involves additional scientists in the LAPD program. The project will support one Ph.D. dissertation and several undergraduate projects.
The NSF support of undergraduate participation adds a broader educational impact through the early-year training of students by introducing them to scientific research as a possible career path.
Awardee:University of California-Irvine Program Officer Name:Steven J Gitomer The National Science Foundation (NSF) award was a supplement to the primary award from the Department of Energy. The primary award supported fast-ion studies in the Large Plasma Device at UCLA performed by a graduate student and senior researchers. The NSF supplement supported undergraduate research in conjunction with the primary project. The primary project was very successful during the most recent project period. "Fast ions" are ions that are far more energetic than the bulk plasma. Using a small compact source, fast ions orbited through turbulent waves called drift waves. A small collector measured the spatial profile of the fast ions to determine how the drift waves altered the fast-ion orbits. The measurements agree well with calculations of the expected effect. A concept called "orbit-averaging" explains all of the observations qualitatively. The project resulted in three original papers in Physics of Plasmas and invited talks at prestigious American and European conferences. In addition, summary journal publications accompanying each conference presentation were published in Physics of Plasmas and Plasma Physics Controlled Fusion, respectively. In September 2013, an oral paper on this work was presented at the 13th IAEA Technical Meeting on Energetic Particles in Magnetic Confinement Systems in Beijing. The NSF supplement supported two undergraduate research projects. The first student (Luke Stagner) participated in the experiments at UCLA, worked on an improved description of the fast-ion distribution function, and presented a poster at the American Division of Plasma Physics conference. He subsequently enrolled in graduate school and is pursuing a Ph.D. degree specializing in plasma physics. The second student (Ryan Cardenas) worked on a small plasma physics device during the summer of 2013. He used interferometers and fast camera imaging to characterize the operational regimes of the source as a function of gas-fill pressure and radio frequency power. Ryan is currently working on a plasma-physics related senior thesis.
