Theodore Jacobson – University of Maryland
Wednesday, October 2nd, 10:45AM EDT
Mathematics of magnetic confinement
Magnetic confinement of plasma for nuclear fusion power has been pursued for over seven decades. While that goal has remained famously elusive, vigorous efforts continue, and one hears about recent progress in the news. Mathematical physics aspects of the confinement dynamics problem recently piqued my curiosity. In this talk I'll offer an outsider's introduction to the topic. The main ideas concern the guiding center approximation, in which the gyro motion of the charged particles is unresolved, and "quasisymmetry", a field symmetry that provides a useful conserved quantity in the absence of a metric isometry.