AUSTRALIA - FLIN

SCHOOL OF CHEMISTRY, PHYSICS AND EARTH SCIENCES
FLINDERS UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA

GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, 5001 South Australia

Telephone: +61 8 8201 2309
Telefax: +61 8 8201 2905
E-mail: robin.storer@flinders.edu.au
URL:   http://www.socpes.flinders.edu.au

Plasma Physics Group
McCarthy, Arthur Lancelot (Experiment)
McMillan, Ben (Theory, also at ANU, Canberra)
Ostrikov, Kostya (Experiment and Theory, also at Nanyang University, Singapore)
Priest, Jayson (Experiment)
Prior, Nathan (Experiment)
Storer, Robin George (Theory)


Research activities:
Plasma theory: The major part of our theoretical and computational effort is directed towards the study of the equilibrium, stability and spectrum of tokamak and stellarator plasmas. In particular the effect of resistivity on plasma stability has been of interest in the major tokamak and stellarator laboratories of the world and a three dimensional code, SPECTOR-3D, has been developed to compute the linear resistive MHD stability of helical or toroidal systems.

The concept of using rotating or travelling magnetic fields to drive plasma currents has produced a range of fascinating theoretical problems. The analysis is multidimensional and nonlinear, involving vector fields, and requires a range of analytical and computational techniques. The analysis of the compact torus, rotamak configuration using a spherical model has involved a new use of expansions in vector spherical harmonics. Both the field reversed configuration and a tokamak-like configuration (with an applied toroidal field) has been treated.

Plasma devices at Flinders: A low-frequency (0.56 MHz) inductively coupled rf plasma source designed for high-density plasma processing (electron number density ~3x10¹⁸ m^-3) is in operation. A chamber designed for the study of dusty plasma crystals has been used to analyse the behaviour of groups of crystalline structures involving various numbers of dust particles and their interaction with time varying electric fields.