USA - COLUMBIA

PLASMA PHYSICS LABORATORY
DEPARTMENT OF APPLIED PHYSICS AND APPLIED MATHEMATICS
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

202 Seeley W. Mudd Building, 500 West 120th Street, New York, New York 10027

Telephone: +1 212 854 4457
Telefax: +1 212 854 8257
E-mail: navratil@columbia.edu
            mauel@columbia.edu
URL:   http://www.apam.columbia.edu/apam/plasma/plasmaintro.html

High Beta Tokamak Experiment (HBT-EP) (Tel.: +1 212 854 4457)

Navratil, Gerald A. (Director)
Mauel, Michael E. (Co-Director)

Bialek, James
Maurer, David

Pedersen, Thomas

Collaboration on NSTX at PPPL (Tel.: +1 609 243 2645)

Sabbagh, Steven A. (Director)
Navratil, Gerald A. (Co-Director)

Bialek, James

Paoletti, Franco

Collaboration on DIII-D at General Atomics (Tel.: +1 619 455 2123)

Navratil, Gerald A. (Director)

Garofalo, Andrea (Co-Director)

Bialek, James

Levitated Dipole Experiment (Tel.: +1 212 854 4455)
URL:   http://www.psfc.mit.edu/ldx/

Mauel, Michael E.
    (Co-Director at Columbia)

Kesner, Jay (Co-Director at MIT)
Garnier, Darren

Hansen, Alex
Pedersen, Thomas

Columbia Linear Mirror Experiment (Tel.: +1 212 854 3124)

Sen, Amiya K. (Director)

Kabantsev, Andrey

Collisionless Terrella Experiment (CTX) (Tel.: +1 212 854 4455)

Mauel, Michael E. (Director)

Maslovsky, Dmitry

Levitt, Ben

Advanced Accelerators and Free Electron Lasers (Tel.: +1 212 854 3116)

Marshall, Thomas C. (Director)

Fang, Jyan-Min

Plasma Theory Group (Tel.: +1 212 854 4457)

Boozer, Allen H.

Tang, Xianzhu

Research activities:
The Plasma Physics Laboratory at Columbia University carries out experimental and theoretical research on the equilibrium and stability properties of high-beta toroidal plasma. The emphasis of the experimental studies is the understanding of beta limiting mechanism in tokamak systems and the extension of these limits through the use of both passive and active mode control techniques using the HBT-EP tokamak facility. Two major collaboration programs are carried out at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory on NSTX and at General Atomics on DIII-D both of which concentrate on the study of the equilibrium and stability properties at high-beta together with investigation of active feedback control of beta limiting MHD modes. A new collaborative experimental program was begun in 1997 to construct a superconducting levitated dipole device (LDX) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study the properties of a hot plasma confined in a magnetic dipole field. The stability and transport properties of basic plasma instabilities are studied in the Columbia Linear Mirror device which has carried out extensive studies of the ion-temperature gradient (ITG) mode. This includes studies of cross-field transport and the use of active feedback control of instabilities for diagnostic purposes. Other experimental work in the laboratory include the Collisionless Terrella Experiment (CTX) to study the confinement of collisionless plasmas in a dipole magnetic field configuration, and a millimeter-wave Free Electron Laser (FEL) to study important FEL phenomena such as optical guiding and control of the output bandwidth and coherence. The plasma theory program is actively involved in high-beta MHD theory and computation, kinetic theory for high-beta plasmas, improved fusion reactor configurations, and space plasma physics.