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Outline of Goals and Scope
"Mixing in Fusion Plasmas" is organized as the invited mini-conference at the 55th Annual
Meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics. The
three sessions of the mini-conference unites scientists working in
the areas of plasma fusion, fluid turbulence, and mixing.
The mixing
plays an important role in fusion plasmas. For instance,
Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) mixing is a central concern for in achieving ignition in
Inertial Confinement Fusion due to the occurrence of Rayleigh-Taylor
instabilities (RTI) at the stages of shock acceleration, steady acceleration
and decelerations of the implosion, and also due to additional seeding of RTI
by the imperfections drive and the target. RT mixing is also known to limit
radial compression of imploding Z-pinches. Somewhat similar processes strongly
affect the plasma transport in magnetic and heavy-ion fusion. While in fusion
environments the mixing process should be mitigated, in some other applications
of high energy density plasmas, for instance, in high energy density laboratory
astrophysics, mixing and turbulent should be enhanced. In all these circumstances,
the understanding the fundamentals of mixing process is necessary
to achieve a better control of the fusion.
Mixing
processes are challenging to study. They involve sharply changing flow fields, strong pressures and accelerations, and strong magnetic
fields. They are
inhomogeneous (i.e., the flow fields are essentially non-uniform, even in
statistical sense, and may involve fronts), anisotropic (i.e., their dynamics
depends on the directions), non-local (i.e., the plasma flow depends on the
initial conditions and on the contributions from all the scales), and
statistically unsteady (i.e., mean values of the quantities vary with time, and
there are also time-dependent fluctuations around these means). Their
properties often strongly deviate from those prescribed by standard
scenarios, such as canonical turbulence at macroscopic scales or local
thermodynamic equilibrium at microscopic scales.
Significant success was recently achieved in large-scale
numerical simulations, in laboratory experiments (especially those in high
power laser systems), in technology development (including possibilities for
improvements in precision, dynamic range, reproducibility, accuracy, and data
acquisition rate), and in theoretical analysis (for instance, new approaches
for handling multi-scale, non-local and statistically unsteady transport). This
opens new opportunities for the studies of fundamental properties of mixing and
turbulent mixing in fusion plasmas.
The Mini-Conference provides the opportunity to bring together scientists from different areas of fusion, including inertial
confinement, magnetic fusion and Z-pinches, as well as key experts in fluid
dynamics, astrophysics, and applied mathematics. It is structured to encourage participants’ communications with experts from
various fields, to promote the exchange of ideas, and to motivate the
discussions of rigorous mathematical issues, theoretical approaches and
state-of-the-art numerical simulations along with advanced experimental
techniques and technological applications.
The Mini-Conference participants include leading experts and
researchers at experienced and early stages of their carriers from academia and
national laboratories.
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