Aachen PK 2003 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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PV: Plenarvorträge

PV III

PV III: Plenarvortrag

Dienstag, 18. März 2003, 09:00–09:45, FO1

Magnetic confinement: How to replace simple scaling laws by physics understanding? — •Sibylle Günter, Clemente Angioni, Frank Jenko, Marc Maraschek, Arthur Peeters, Simon Pinches, Bruce Scott, Giovanni Tardini, Hartmut Zohm, and the ASDEX Upgrade Team — Max-Plank-Institut für Plasmaphysik, Boltzmannstr. 2, 85748 Garching

One of the most important problems in magnetic fusion experiments is to achieve sufficient confinement of particles and energy. Simple estimations of transport coefficients in such nearly collision free plasmas predict extremely good confinement. Therefore in the very beginning of magnetic fusion research one expected to achieve ignition in very small experiments. In reality however, the transport coefficients exceed such simple estimations by up to two orders of magnitude. It has been proven that turbulence is responsible for this enhanced transport. In addition macroscopic instabilities pose upper limits to the pressure and current gradients. The understanding of the physics mechanism relevant for the turbulent transport and even more its quantitative treatment is only possible with modern high performance computers. Therefore, so far simple empirical scaling laws based on previous experiments have been used to predict the confinement for future experiments. Recently however, the understanding of the turbulent transport has significantly improved. Step by step simple scaling laws have been replaced by a detailed understanding of temperature and density profiles which result from given heating and particle sources. This talk will give an overview on the latest achievement in this process.