Thermonuclear physics

The physics of high-temperature, multi-keV, collisionless plasmas, usually immersed in a magnetic field of complex geometry, is dominated by the behavior of unique many-body systems in which collective phenomena dominate over rare two-body collisions. These plasmas are usually far from the thermodynamic equilibrium, due to sources of mode-excitation energy that owe their existence to factors including: electrodynamic forces with spatial inhomogeneties (this is the case in magnetic or inertial confinement systems with gradients of density, temperature, magnetic field, etc.); the presence of high-energy subgroups of particles (or beams); and large-amplitude electromagnetic waves that propagate in the plasma and transfer their energy, inducing strong nonlinear interactions among background collective modes and charged particles.

At MIT, pioneering investigations on the physical properties of high t...