[en] Analytical and numerical work is used in tandem to address the problem of turbulent transport of energetic ions in magnetized plasmas. It is shown that orbit averaging is not valid under rather generic conditions, and that perpendicular decorrelation effects lead to a slow 1/E decay of the electrostatic particle diffusivity of beam ions, while the respective magnetic quantity is even independent of the particle energy E

[en] It is shown that there exist two types of m = n = 1 fishbone modes with frequencies significantly exceeding the frequency of the conventional fishbone instability. One of them is the resonance continuum mode (RCM), and the other is the non-resonance gap mode (NGM). They are associated with the trapped energetic ions and arise due to plasma compressibility. The spatial structure of the RCM may differ considerably from the rigid kink displacement inherent in the conventional fishbone mode.

[en] New energetic particle mode instabilities of fishbone type are predicted. The considered instabilities are driven by the circulating energetic ions. They can arise in plasmas of tokamaks and spherical tori with weak magnetic shear in the wide core region and strong shear at the periphery, provided that the central safety factor is close to the ratio m/n, where m and n are the poloidal mode number and toroidal mode number, respectively. The instability with m = n = 1 has interchange-like spatial structure, whereas the structure of instabilities with m/n > 1 is similar to that of the infernal MHD mode (except for the region in vicinity of the local Alfven resonance)

[en] Collisions with cold particles can dissipate a hot particle’s energy and therefore can be exploited as a cooling mechanism. Kinetics teach us that cooling a particle down by several orders of magnitude typically takes many elastic collisions as each one only carries away a fraction of the collision energy. Recently, for a system comprising hot ions and cold atoms, a very fast cooling process has been suggested (Ravi et al 2012 Nat. Commun. 3 1126) where cooling over several orders of magnitude can occur in a single step. Namely, in a homo-nuclear atom–ion collision, an electron can resonantly hop from an ultracold atom onto the hot ion, converting the cold atom into a cold ion. Here, we demonstrate such swap cooling in a direct way as we experimentally observe how a single energetic ion loses energy in a cold atom cloud. In order to contrast swap cooling with sympathetic cooling, we perform the same measurements with a hetero-nuclear atom–ion system, for which swap cooling cannot take place, and indeed observe very different cooling dynamics. Ab initio numerical model calculations agree well with our measured data and corroborate our interpretations. (paper)

No abstract available

[en] A possibility to improve the confinement of energetic ions in stellarators by transforming trapped particles into passing ones using RF waves is investigated. It is concluded that waves with frequencies around the ion gyrofrequency or lower can, in principle, be used for this purpose if certain requirements are satisfied. The suitability of the W7-X ICRH system is considered, and other means for achieving fast-ion confinement are discussed. (paper)

[en] Results from two different sets of JET experiments are presented. In experiments in which toroidicity-induced Alfvén eigenmodes (TAEs) localized at different radial locations had the same frequencies and toroidal mode numbers, the occurrence of enhanced losses after the excitation of TAEs in the core of the plasma was observed. On the contrary, enhanced losses were not observed if the TAEs localized at different radial locations had different frequencies and toroidal mode numbers. Numerical modeling indicates that, in the first set of experiments, the enhanced losses were caused by a combined effect of the TAEs localized at different radial locations. The TAEs localized in the plasma core transported energetic ions from the core to outer regions of the plasma. Then, the TAEs localized in outer regions of the plasma interacted with these ions just transported by the core-localized TAEs causing a further radial displacement of the ions to the plasma edge. This process eventually ends up causing the loss of the resonant ions. In the second set of experiments, it was found that TAEs localized in the plasma core and in outer regions did not interact with the same ions and so no enhanced losses were measured. Sheared profiles of the safety factor combined with flat mass density profiles lead to larger differences on the frequencies of the TAEs localized at different radial locations, eventually avoiding loss of energetic ions through the described mechanism. (paper)

[en] Different experimental schemes for investigation of warm dense matter produced with intense energetic ion beams are presented. The described target configurations allow direct measurements of thermophysical and transport properties of warm dense matter without hydrodynamic recalculations. The presented experiments will be realized at the current GSI synchrotron SIS-18 and the future FAIR facility in the framework of the WDM-collaboration.

[en] Recently, Schwadron and McComas discussed the possibility of inner source pickup particles originating from the ionization of energetic neutral atoms (ENAs), based on new data from the IBEX mission. This proposition has some interesting features, namely, it might be able to explain why inner source pickup ions (PUIs) have a composition resembling solar abundances and show no indication of overabundance of refractory elements, although this should be expected, if the conventional explanation of solar wind-dust interaction for the origin of this heliospheric component were correct. In this Letter, we explore further consequences for ENA-related PUIs and investigate their velocity distributions. We conclude that this model will not reproduce the observed velocity distributions of inner source PUIs and point out a substantial deviation in their composition. However, it seems likely that the ionization of ENAs as observed with IBEX could contribute a significant amount of heliospheric suprathermal tail ions. Some possible consequences of our investigation for heliospheric particle populations are briefly discussed.

[en] A new ion identification method for ΔE-E telescopes is presented. The method works by counting data points under ΔE(E) curves on ΔE-E diagrams. These curves are obtained by simulating the telescope response to a flux of energetic ions. The method is checked against three published methods applied to several experimental data sets