Fusion News: Science Daily – Tossed On the Waves: Charting the Path of Ejected Particles
New experiments are beginning to shed light on the underlying physics of high energy particles in fusion reactions, according to an article in Science Daily titled “Tossed On the Waves: Charting the Path of Ejected Particles.”
By arranging their detectors at the edge of a fusion device, researchers have found that they are able to measure high energy particles kicked out of the plasma by a type of wave that exists in fusion plasmas called an Alfvén wave (named after their discoverer, the Nobel Prize winner Hannes Alfvén). The measurements of these lost fast ions also allow for the conclusive identification of the path the particles took en route to the detector, thereby determining which waves (amongst a veritable sea of many different waves) the particles interacted with along their way to the reactor wall. It has previously only been possible to identify interactions between an ion and a single mode, or wave, making the present multiple-wave work an unprecedented view into this fundamental wave-particle physics.
