NCSX has been designed to accommodate a variety of heating systems, including ohmic heating, neutral beam injection, and RF. Neutral beams will provide one of the primary heating methods for NCSX. In addition to plasma heating, neutral beams are also expected to provide a means for external control over the level of toroidal plasma rotation velocity and its profile. The experimental plan requir...

A detailed design is presented of a tokamak power reactor with an electron cyclotron resonance heating system. Major research topics include: physics constraints imposed on the design of a reactor by the ECR wave absorption conditions; design of the high frequency (200 GHz) gyrotrons needed for plasma heating; the gyrotron power and magnet systems; a microwave transmission system in oversize wa...

A high-0 hot-electron plasma was studied in an asymmetric magnetic mirror device with a variable cant angle. The plasma was produced by microwave heating at a frequency corresponding to cold-electron-cyclotron resonance together with a higher frequency suitable for upper-off-resonance heating. The position of the high-0 plasma annulus was studied as a function of cant angle and was found to cor...

A connection between kinetic processes and intermittent turbulence is observed in the solar wind plasma using measurements from the Wind spacecraft at 1 A.U. In particular, kinetic effects such as temperature anisotropy and plasma heating are concentrated near coherent structures, such as current sheets, which are nonuniformly distributed in space. Furthermore, these coherent structures are pre...

Optimal Control Theory is used to analyze the laser-heating of plasmas confined in strong solenoidal magnetic fields. Heating strategies that minimize a linear combination of heating time and total energy spent by the laser system are found. A numerical example is used to illustrate the theory. Results of this example show that by an appropriate modulation of the laser intensity, significant sa...

Thermal processes are widely used in small molecule chemical analysis and metabolomics for derivatization, vaporization, chromatography, and ionization, especially in gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC/MS). In this study the effect of heating was examined on a set of 64 small molecule standards and, separately, on human plasma metabolite extracts. The samples, either derivatized or underi...

We present an analysis of ion temperatures in laser-produced plasmas formed from solids with different initial lattice structures. We show that the equilibrium ion temperature is limited by a mismatch between the initial crystallographic configuration and the close-packed configuration of a strongly-coupled plasma, similar to experiments in ultracold neutral plasmas. We propose experiments to d...