Lecturer: Declan Diver, Scott Doyle, Bengt Eliasson, Kevin Ronald, Craig Stark
Institution: Strathclyde, Glasgow and Aberdeen
Hours Equivalent Credit: 12
Assessment: Multiple Choice Exam and Continuous Assessment
Course Summary
This course will address fundamental concepts in plasmas, from plasma creation from a neutral gas through to full ionization. Basic plasma timescales and length scales will be derived, such as the plasma, cyclotron and collision frequencies, skin depth, sheath extent and Larmor radius. Waves and instabilities in fully ionized (and magnetized) fluid and kinetic plasmas will also be addressed. The many natural and man-made types of plasma and their applications will be outlined and in particular magnetically confined plasmas will be discussed with examples, including tokamaks.
