12月5日物理论坛学术报告《Understanding the Saturation and Suppression of Turbulence in Magnetized Plasmas》 [2010-12-02]

报告题目：Understanding the Saturation and Suppression of Turbulence in Magnetized Plasmas

报告人：Prof.Kenneth W. Gentle     University of Texas at Austin,APS fellow

报告时间：12月5日（周日）下午2:30

报告地点：物理学院二楼报告厅

组织单位：物理学院 近代物理系

报告摘要：

    Inhomogeneous plasmas are always found to be in a turbulent state with transport rates much higher than that of collisional fluids.  Understanding the processes that control the level of turbulence and rate of transport has proven to be a difficult task.  One generic candidate is flow shear, driven either internally by zonal flows or externally by momentum input, but experimental evidence is largely circumstantial.  Observations in a large basic physics device with a simple geometry, the cylindrical slab, which has dimensionless parameters similar to those of the edge of a tokamak, show saturated turbulence with no production of zonal flows.  Most important, the turbulence level can be greatly reduced by application of bias, which alters the flow patterns.  However, there is no correlation between the local turbulence level and local flow shear.  Other processes must control the turbulence levels.

报告人简介：

　　Dr. Gentle attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving an S.B. (1962) and Ph.D. (1966) in physics.  He continued as an instructor there in 1966.  He was appointed Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, Associate Professor in 1970, and Professor in 1976.  He received an Alfred Sloan Fellowship for 1973-75.  He was appointed Josey Professor of Energy, 1986-88.

　　Since 1966, he has been engaged in a variety of experiments on nonlinear plasma waves, weak plasma turbulence, strong plasma turbulence, and tokamak confinement physics.  In 1973, he assumed leadership of the first tokamak experiment at the University of Texas.  In 1976, he initiated the TEXT Tokamak project, serving as director until 1985.  He received a Department of Energy Certificate of Appreciation for this work in 1985.

　　He continued to work on TEXT, engaging in a number of experiments on transport and heating, until the completion of the project in 1996.   He has also conducted particle transport experiments on ASDEX as a guest of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Munich, in a collaboration begun in 1986.  His current transport research involves experiments using the tokamak facilties at MIT and General Atomics, San Diego, as  well as basic turbulence experiments on the Helimak at the University.

　　He has served on a number of advisory committees and review panels for the National Academy of Sciences, National Science Foundation, and Department of Energy.  In 1989, he served on the Foreign Applied Sciences Assessment Center panel assessing the West European magnetic fusion program, writing the chapter on tokamaks.

　　He was chairman of the physics department from January, 1997, to January, 2001, and he has been Director of the Fusion Research Center since August, 1998.

　　He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the European Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.   He received the International Scientific and Technological Cooperation Award of the People's Repbulic of China in 2004.

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