Magnetic islands, bubble-like structures that form in fusion plasmas, can grow and disrupt the plasmas and damage the doughnut-shaped tokamak facilities that house fusion reactions. Recent research at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has used large-scale computer simulations to produce a new model that could be key to understanding how the islands interact with the surrounding plasma as they grow and lead to disruptions.
The findings, which overturn long-held assumptions of the structure and impact of magnetic islands, are from simulations led by visiting physicist Jae-Min Kwon. Kwon, on a year-long sabbatical from the Korean Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) facility, worked with physicists at PPPL to model the detailed and surprising experimental observations recently made on KSTAR.
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