arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Charles F. F. Karney.
A theory for the generation of current in a toroidal plasma by radio-frequency waves is presented. The effect of an opposing electric field is included, allowing the case of time varying currents to be studied. The key quantities that characterize this regime are identified and numerically calculated. Circuit equations suitable for use in ray-tracing and transport codes are given.
In recent years, there has been considerable interest in understanding the motion in Hamiltonian systems when phase space is divided into stochastic and integrable regions. This paper studies one aspect of this problem, namely, the motion of trajectories in the stochastic sea when there is a small island present. The results show that the particle can be stuck close to the island for very long times. For the standard mapping, where accelerator modes are possible, it appears that the mean squared displacement of particles in the stochastic sea may increase faster than linearly with time indicating non-diffusive behavior.
The phase space for Hamiltonians of two degrees of freedom is usually divided into stochastic and integrable components. Even when well into the stochastic regime, integrable orbits may surround small stable regions or islands. The effect of these islands on the correlation function for the stochastic trajectories is examined. Depending on the value of the parameter describing the rotation number for the elliptic fixed point at the center of the island, the long-time correlation function may decay as t^-5 or exponentially, but more commonly it decays much more slowly (roughly as t^-1). As a consequence these small islands may have a profound effect on the properties of the stochastic orbits. In particular, there is evidence that the evolution of a distribution of particles is no longer governed by a diffusion equation.
The effect of a small amount of noise on the standard mapping is considered. Whenever the standard mapping possesses accelerator modes (where the action increases approximately linearly with time), the diffusion coefficient contains a term proportional to the reciprocal of the variance of the noise term. At large values of the stochasticity parameter, the accelerator modes exhibit a universal behavior. As a result the dependence of the diffusion coefficient on the stochasticity parameter also shows some universal behavior.
The propagation of lower hybrid waves in the presence of ponderomotive density fluctuations is considered. The problem is treated in two dimensions and, in order to be able to correctly impose the boundary conditions, the waves are allowed to evolve in time. The fields are described by i v_tau - \int v_xi dzeta + v_{zeta zeta} + |v|^2 v = 0 where v is proportional to the electric field, tau to time, and zeta and xi measure distances across and along the lower hybrid ray. The behavior of the waves is investigated numerically. If the amplitude of the waves is large enough, the spectrum of the waves broadens and their parallel wavelength becomes shorter. The assumptions made in the formulation preclude the application of these results to the lower hybrid heating experiment on Alcator-A. Nevertheless, there are indications that the physics embodied in this problem are responsible for some of the results of that experiment.
The motion of ions in the fields B = B_0 zhat and E = E_0 yhat cos(k_perp y - omega t) is considered. When omega >> Omega_i and v_perp > omega/k_perp, the equations of motion may be reduced to a set of difference equations. These equations exhibit stochastic behavior when E_0 exceeds a threshold. The diffusion coefficient above the threshold is determined. Far above the threshold, ion Landau damping is recovered. Extension of the method to include parallel propagation is outlined.
The motion of an ion in a coherent lower hybrid wave (characterized by |k_parallel| << |k_perp| and omega >> Omega_i) in a tokamak plasma is studied. For ions satisfying v_perp > omega/k_perp, the Lorentz force law for the ions is reduced to a set of difference equations which give the Larmor radius and phase of an ion on one cyclotron orbit in terms of these quantities a cyclotron period earlier. From these difference equations an earlier result [Phys. Fluids 21, 1584 (1978)] that above a certain wave amplitude the ion motion is stochastic, is readily obtained. The stochasticity threshold is given a simple physical interpretation. In addition, the difference equations are used to derive a diffusion equation governing the heating of the ions above the stochasticity threshold. By including the effects of collisions, the heating rate for the bulk ions is obtained.
A Monte Carlo method is given to compute the binding affinity of a ligand to a protein. The method involves extending configuration space by a discrete variable indicating whether the ligand is bound to the protein and a special Monte Carlo move which allows transitions between the unbound and bound states. Provided that an accurate protein structure is given, that the protein-ligand binding site is known, and that an accurate chemical force field together with a continuum solvation model is used, this method provides a quantitative estimate of the free energy of binding.
The Green's function for rf-driven currents in a toroidal plasma is calculated in the long mean-free-path limit.
In the study of long-time correlations extremely long orbits must be calculated. This may be accomplished much more reliably using fixed-point arithmetic. Use of this arithmetic on the Cray-1 computer is illustrated.
The collision operator for a relativistic plasma is reformulated in terms of an expansion in spherical harmonics. In this formulation the collision operator is expressed in terms of five scalar potentials which are given by one-dimensional integrals over the distribution function. This formulation is used to calculate the electrical conductivity of a uniform electron-ion plasma with infinitely massive ions.