Whatever the use, controlling chaos and boosting particle flow efficiency are the goals of the scientific community in this field.
A paper describing a new contribution in this direction has recently been published in the journal Physics of Plasmas by Meirielen Caetano de Sousa, a postdoctoral student with a scholarship from São Paulo Research Foundation -- FAPESP working at the University of São Paulo's Physics Institute (IF-USP) in Brazil, and her supervisor Iberê Luiz Caldas, Full Professor at IF-USP.
Study - Modeling - Simulation - Ways - Chaos "We performed a theoretical study with modeling and numerical simulation to investigate ways of controlling chaos inside accelerators and increasing the maximum velocity of accelerated particles," Sousa said.
The authors designed a mechanism based on the deployment of a transport barrier to confine the particles and prevent them from moving from one region of the accelerator to another. This procedure has not yet been implemented in ordinary accelerators but is used in tokamaks (experimental toroidal reactors used in nuclear fusion research), where superheated plasma is prevented by particle confinement from interacting with the walls of the device.
Tokamaks - Transport - Barrier - Means - Electrodes "In tokamaks, the transport barrier is obtained by means of electrodes inserted into the plasma edge to alter the electric field. This hasn't yet been done in accelerators, where the usual solution is to add an electrostatic wave with well-defined parameters to the system," said the FAPESP-supported researcher.
"When the wave interacts with the particles, it controls chaos in the system but creates multiple barriers that don't seal the region as precisely. This is a less robust solution. In our study, we modeled a system with a single barrier along similar lines to what happens in tokamaks."
Barrier - Perturbation - RMP - Plasma - Region This single robust barrier would be produced by a resonant magnetic perturbation. In responding to the RMP, the plasma is confined to a single region.
"We created the model and described it mathematically. The...
(Excerpt) Read more at: ScienceDaily