The American Physical Society held its 49th Annual Meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics during the week of November 12 in Orlando, Florida. I presented a poster that included some of my thesis work. There was a lot of interesting material shown throughout the week long conference and I have compiled some of it here.

Sunset in Orlando, Florida.

The opening talk was a review of progress in simulating turbulence and transport in tokamaks by Greg Hammett. Professor Hammett has a web page of turbulence simulation visualizations similar to what was presented at the conference. Once he posts his APS talk be sure to check out the slide in which he itemizes the 1023 (or was it 1025?) improvement in speed for these types of simulations over the past many years.

The only thing better than simulating turbulence is measuring it, so I visited a lot of experimental posters. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to find these types of results posted online, and the APS abstract list does not provide much information for the general plasma enthusiast, so there is no collection of references I can link here.

University work is often much easier to find online, and I'll take this opportunity to point out some of the interesting work I saw for which references can be provided. The Versatile Toroidal Facility (VTF) at MIT does a lot of work on turbulence, including “blobs”, which is something that was very popular at the conference. To oversimplify it, blobs are pieces of plasma that blast out of magnetic confinement devices uncontrollably. They have the potential to destroy fusion-grade tokamaks, which is part of the motivation for studying them. If you would like to see a movie of blobs in action, Dr. Stewart Zweben at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has provided a large number of them on his web page under the section titled “Videos of Edge Turbulence” (this one is a good starting place).

Turbulence is also studied through the measurement of fluctuating quantities, be they temperature, potentials, or densities. A fellow UCLA physics graduate student gave an invited talk about the relationship between temperature and density fluctuations in DIII-D and their comparison to simulations using the GYRO code. This is an important effort because it is generally difficult to compare turbulence experiments with simulations. Hammett described the increasing ability of simulations to include relevant physics and produce results in a timely manner, but combining these types of results with experimental data is not common, yet. Comparisons between experiments and simulations is on the rise as measurements improve alongside the codes. More information on the experimental side of this effort can be found from the UCLA Plasma Diagnostic Group (they provide downloads of some of their presentations and publications).

The main presentation room, lots of seats for lots of people.

One conference first was the inclusion of a Wikipedia reference in a review talk. The entry on fiber Bragg grating provided a clear example of frequency gap generation in optical fibers that feature a periodic index of refraction. A connection was made between this and the frequency gaps of Alfvén eigenmodes. There is some good stuff on Wikipedia.

If attending a conference in Orlando, be sure to either get there early or stay late. That might give you the opportunity to visit Disney's Animal Kingdom, where you might go on the Kilimanjaro Safari, where you might just see a lion.

A lion peeks out from behind a rock. One look towards our truck was enough to rile some riders.

See the full size image here.

Tags: plasma conference, plasma physics, plasma turbulence