High-temperature plasmas in a tokamak fusion test reactor

A sustained high-temperature fusion plasma regime facilitated by fast ions

Nuclear fusion is one of the most attractive alternatives to carbon-dependent energy sources¹. Harnessing energy from nuclear fusion in a large reactor scale, however, still presents many scientific challenges despite the many years of research and steady advances in magnetic confinement approaches. State-of-the-art magnetic fusion devices cannot yet achieve a sustainable fusion performance, which requires a high temperature above 100 million kelvin and sufficient control of instabilities to ensure steady-state operation on the order of tens of seconds^2,3. Here we report experiments at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research⁴ device producing a plasma fusion regime that satisfies most of the above requirements: thanks to abundant fast ions stabilizing the core plasma turbulence, we generate plasmas at a temperature of 100 million kelvin lasting up to 20 seconds without plasma edge instabilities or impurity accumulation. A low plasma density combined with a moderate input power for operation is key to establishing this regime by preserving a high fraction of fast ions. This regime is rarely subject to disruption and can be sustained reliably even without a sophisticated control, and thus represents a promising path towards commercial fusion reactors.

Review of plasma turbulence experiments

Understandings of turbulent plasma have been developed along with nuclear fusion research for more than a half century. Long international research has produced discoveries concerning turbulent plasma that allow us to notice the hidden nature and physics questions that could contribute to other scientific fields and the development of technologies. Guiding concepts have been established up to now that stimulate investigations on turbulent plasma. Research based on concepts concerning symmetry breaking and global linkage requires observing the entire field of plasma turbulence for an ultimate understanding of plasma. This article reviews the achievements as well as contemporary problems regarding turbulence experiments associated with strongly magnetized plasmas in the last and present century, and introduces forthcoming experimental issues, including new diagnostics and physics-oriented devices related to plasma turbulence.

Energy loss and Z oscillations of atomic beams in plasmas

We apply a semiclassical partial-wave-scattering method based on the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin approximation to study the transport cross section and the energy loss of neutral or ionized atomic beams in plasmas. This approach reproduces the exact quantum result in a satisfactory manner, even in several extreme conditions of plasma densities and temperatures, and agrees with the results of linear or perturbative calculations for bare ions in the appropriate limits. We pay special attention to low projectile speeds where strong oscillations in the transport cross section and energy loss-as a function of projectile's atomic number-are observed. We study these oscillatory phenomena varying the projectile speed and its ionization degree and the plasma temperature and density. We analyze in physical terms these effects and present a diagram of plasma conditions showing the regions where these oscillations may occur for both neutral and ionized beams.