TITLE:

THEORY AND COMPUTATIONS IN THE PHYSICS OF IONIZED GASSES

DATE:

Friday, Nov 30th, 2012

TIME:

3:30 PM

LOCATION:

GMCS 214

SPEAKER:

Evstati G. Evstatiev.
University of Texas.

ABSTRACT:

Highly ionized gasses (plasmas) are a mixture of charged particles,
electrons and ions, with some special defining properties.
One such property is their ability
to respond to external electric and magnetic fields collectively; that is,
a plasma is much more than a collection of individual charges.
One of the earliest observations of collective response was the basic plasma
oscillation (also called the Langmuir oscillation), in which
electrostatic waves are excited externally but sustained within
the plasma.

Plasma is found everywhere around us, including 99% of all visible space matter.
Gasses in the Sun (and stars) are so highly ionized
that are also in a plasma state; solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and
astrophysical jets from accretion disks are all manifestations of plasmas.
Plasmas on the Earth have found a wide variety of applications too, e.g.,
light sources (neon lights), plasma materials processing (semiconductor industry,
surface coating, welding), etc.; but perhaps the most grandiose plasma project
humanity has undertaken, only comparable to the Large Hadron Collider in CERN,
Europe, is the controlled nuclear fusion device ITER (International Thermonuclear
Fusion Reactor).

In this talk, I will discuss various applications of plasma physics,
its theoretical methods and, in more detail, its computational aspect.

HOST:

Dr. Ricardo Carretero.

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