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Scientists Tracking Elusive Plasma ‘Blobs’ and ‘Voids’ Unravel a Longstanding Fusion Energy Mystery
New research involving plasma blobs and voids within tokamaks could soon solve a longstanding mystery in nuclear fusion research.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, made the discovery, which identified instabilities at the plasma’s outer boundary, a phenomenon previously overlooked by fusion scientists, as a key source of this discrepancy. The research, detailed in a new study by physicists Mingyun Cao and Patrick Diamond, focuses on the donut-shaped reactors known as tokamaks, which use magnetic fields to confine high-energy plasma during fusion reactions. In their paper’s abstract, they write that their new model “shows promise to resolve several questions surrounding the shortfall problem and the strong turbulence in the edge-core coupling region.” Cao and Diamond are conducting further studies to validate their new findings by comparing theoretical predictions with recent experimental data.
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