Jeff Waksman is a third-year student, majoring in Applied Physics, and interested in high-temperature plasma physics. Jeff completed a research project with Prof. Mike Mauel and Dr. Ben Levitt using Columbia University's Collisionless Terella Experiment. In CTX, a high-temperature plasma is created with microwave heating and confined by a strong dipole electromagnet. When a ring (made from a tungsten mesh) is biased negatively, the plasma spins at high speeds. A centrifugal interchange mode appears that mixes the inner dense plasma with the less dense outer plasma. Jeff's research involved acquiring the high-speed current signals from a 96-element polar imaging diagnostic and developing the software that analyzed the data and produced high-speed "movies" of the unstable plasma.
Dr. Levitt was invited to present these results at the annual meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics. Details of the first laboratory observation of the plasma centrifugal instability will appear in Physical Review Letters and in a longer article in the Physics of Plasmas.
Jeff Waksman's presentation during the FFSEAS Showcase is a 22MB Quicktime Movie in MPEG4 format. (May take a few minutes to load...22MB.)
