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Local Regulation of Interchange Turbulence in a Dipole-Confined Plasma Torus using Current Injection Feedback

Posted on:2016-09-17Degree:Ph.DType:Dissertation
University:Columbia UniversityCandidate:Roberts, Thomas MaximillianFull Text:PDF
GTID:1470390017984482Subject:Plasma physics
Abstract/Summary:
Turbulence in plasma confined by a magnetic dipole is dominated by interchange fluctuations with complex dynamics and short spatial coherence. We report the first use of local current-collection feedback to modify, amplify, and suppress these fluctuations. The spatial extent of turbulence regulation is limited to a correlation length near the collector. Changing the gain and phase of collection results in power either extracted from or injected into the turbulence. This mechanism is analogous to the magnetospheric-ionospheric coupling by field-aligned currents. The measured plasma response shows some agreement with calculations of the linear response of global interchange-like MHD and entropy modes to current-collection feedback.
Keywords/Search Tags:Turbulence, Plasma
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