"THEORETICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS IN FUSION RESEARCH: RELATED ISSUES IN ASTROPHYSICS"
The ten great unresolved problems of physics identified by a recent
poll of British scientists include that of fusion energy, which follows
quantum gravity and the understanding of the nucleus. Resolving this
problem means producing ignited plasmas where the energy released in them
by the fusion reaction products can compensate for all energy losses.
These plasmas are self organized entities, dominated by the excitation
of collective modes whose effects cannot be precisely predicted theoretically.
The high magnetic field technologies that have been developed starting
with the Alcator program at MIT and the properties of the well confined
high density plasmas discovered by it, have led to conceive the Ignitor
experiment that has been the first proposed and designed to achieve ignition.
One of the main original motivations of the Alcator project was to produce
plasmas with the diverse radiation emission spectra of the few X-ray stars
that were known at that time. In fact, astrophysics and fusion research
are intrinsically linked as important phenomena such as magnetic reconnection,
and transport of angular momentum due to plasma collective modes are relevant
to both fields. The identification by space research of plasma regimes
(e.g. in the heliosphere) and objects, galactic and extragalactic, for
which the familiar concepts of statistical mechanisms are not appropriate,
points to the need to extend the reach of the limited theoretical tools
developed so far for the description of plasmas far from thermal equilibrium
investigated for fusion research.