Papers, talks, and other items that appear on my Curriculum Vitae.
I recently participated in the European Physical Society’s 43rd Conference on Plasma Physics where I gave an oral presentation concerning ion cyclotron emission in tokamaks. Besides having the cool abbreviation of ICE, ion cyclotron emission is interesting because it might be something that can be measured in ITER to provide an indication of the confinement of energetic ions.…
This is an engineering paper concerning the design of an antenna that was installed in the DIII-D tokamak. There are particle beams on DIII-D that provide up to 20 MW of heating power for the plasma. In this paper, we simulated a few scenarios in which an appreciable fraction of this beam power hits the…
David C. Pace Diagnostic Systems Coordinator at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility General Atomics San Diego, California, USA Education Honors and Awards Professional Activities Research Experience Teaching Experience Publications and Presentations Co-author Publications Education University of California, Los Angeles, USA Ph.D., Physics, 2009 M.Sc., Physics 2003 Committee Co-chairs: G.J. Morales…
The following work is a technical diagnostic paper concerning a method for calculating the uncertainty in a probe that measures energetic ion losses in the DIII-D tokamak. The fast ion loss detector (FILD) measures the pitch angle and the energy of these ions that hit it at the outer wall. That measurement is incredibly valuable…
This is a technical paper concerning the design and commissioning of a gamma ray camera on the DIII-D tokamak. The diagnostic, the Gamma Ray Imager (GRI), is a pinhole camera constructed of lead. This diagnostic is being used to study the behavior of relativistic electron beams in magnetically confined fusion plasmas. Gamma rays can be…
Sections Details and Download Previous Work Modeling Lorentzian Pulses What is the Relevance? This is a review of a paper recently published by my group. Here, the paper is paraphrased to reach a wider audience. The plasma physics community can read the original publication, so my goal is to provide an example of current plasma…
The following article first appeared as David C. Pace, William W. Heidbrink, and Michael A. Van Zeeland, “Keeping Fusion Plasmas Hot,” Physics Today 68, 34 (2015). In the article, we discuss interactions between high energy ions and electromagnetic waves in magnetically confined plasmas. These plasmas are produced in nuclear fusion reactors known as tokamaks. My research…
This paper means a lot to me. It has both a technical side and an emotional side. The physics of this paper concerns how small scale turbulent fluctuations in the plasma (e.g., fluctuations of the plasma density) can affect the way that energetic ions move across the magnetic field. Fundamentally, the orbit size of these…
This paper describes the Fast Ion Loss Detector (FILD) at the Alcator C-Mod tokamak. The FILD captures ions that are accelerated to high energies due to radio wave power injection into C-Mod. A couple of neat things about this diagnostic are that it is made of the same molybdenum material as the walls in C-Mod, and…
This paper describes observations of injected radio wave power getting absorbed by edge ions in the DIII-D tokamak. It’s a valuable observation because we inject those radio waves in order to heat the plasma more towards the center of the tokamak, so if some of that energy gets absorbed by particles in the far edge, then…