Plasma Physics for Nuclear Fusion: Revised Edition

The original English language edition of this work appeared in 1979. Since then researchers around the world have made slow but steady progress toward the realization of sustained, controlled nuclear fusion. This new edition has been updated to review the important contributions of the past decade. The final chapter, "Confinement of High?Temperature Plasmas," has been rewritten entirely to include the recent results of confinement in several types of devices and advances the understanding of wave heating. Miyamoto's approach is unique in encompassing Western, Soviet, and Japanese research in the fusion field The book's 16 chapters are grouped into four major subject areas. Chapters in the first part develop the fundamentals of plasma physics and present the conditions of nuclear fusion reactions; those in the next two parts provide a magnetohydrodynamic description of plasmas and explain wave phenomena and instabilities by means of a kinetic model. Concluding chapters take up the problems of heating, diagnostics, and confinement. Specific topics include the Lawson condition; Boltzmann and Vlasov equations; plasma equilibrium; magnetohydrodynamic instabilities; waves in cold and hot plasmas; microinstabilities; fast neutral beam injection and wave heating; and diagnostics using microwaves, lasers, and energy analyzers. Plasma confinement in tokamaks and stellarators, multipole fields, mirrors, and cusps, as well as inertial confinement, are reviewed. Kenro Miyamoto, is Professor of Physics at the University of Tokyo.