Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Los Alamos National Laboratory have uncovered a key process behind a major challenge called thermal quenches, the rapid heat loss in hot plasmas that can occur in doughnut-shaped tokamak fusion devices. Such quenches are sudden drops of electron heat in the plasma that fuels fusion reactions, drops that can create damaging disruptions inside the tokamak. Understanding the physics behind these quenches, caused by powerful perturbations in the magnetic fields that confine the plasma in tokamaks, could lead to methods to mitigate or prevent them.
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Source: Phys.org