Michael E. Mauel builds experiments to study high-temperature ionized gas, called plasma, and explores how strong magnetic fields guide plasma motion in the space surrounding Earth, at the surfaces of stars, and inside the cores of fusion energy reactors that may someday produce cleaner, healthier, and nearly unlimited power. Plasma within these experiments have very high temperatures, more than 10 million degrees, and can become hotter than sellar cores. Together with his students and collaborators, Mauel uses real-time systems to control how plasma mixes within the containment vessels, shapes magnetic bottles to better confine high pressure plasma, launches electromagnetic waves to generate electrons that move through the plasma at speeds near the speed of light, and identifies, images, and controls the instabilities that may destroy plasma confinement and inhibit fusion energy production.
Mauel’s current research interest include nonlinear turbulent transport in magnetized plasma, energetic particle modes, the relationship between laboratory and space plasma physics, and feedback techniques to control instabilities in advanced tokamak operating regimes. He injects currents, waves, magnetic fields to reveal the processes that transform energy within the plasma, move particles across magnetic flux tubes, and generate flows.
Links:
- Columbia University
- Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematic
- U.S. Department of Energy Fusion Energy Science
- NSF Partnership in Basic Plasma Science and Engineering
- Superconducting levitated dipole (LDX). LDX is a high-temperature plasma experiment whose goal is to evaluate the properties of a strong, superconducting dipole magnet to confine high-temperature plasma. See a documentary of our "first plasma" experiments conducted with the newly completed facility. Experiments with LDX and the RT-1 device at the University of Tokyo showed that high-pressure plasma can be well-confined in steady state without the large toroidal magnets used in tokamaks and stellarators.
- Jefferson Science Fellowship
- Columbia University's Plasma Physics Laboratory is the site for several high-temperature plasma experiments. The HBT-EP tokamak investigates the application of magnetic controls to stabilize plasma instabilities at high pressure. The Collisionless Terrella Experiment (CTX) is the world's first "artificial radiation belt". We are able to study the long-time, coherent interactions between energetic trapped electrons and a variety of plasma and electromagnetic fluctuations.
- Research interests
- Personal hobbies, etc.
- Send Email to Mauel...
Department of Applied Physics
Columbia University
Room 210 S. W. Mudd Building
New York, NY 10027 U.S.A.
Phone: (212) 854-4455
Fax: (212) 854-8257
Email: mauel@columbia.edu
Publications and Courses:
- Courses:
- APAM 1601y Intro to Computational Physics and Mathematics
- APPH 3200 Mechanics: Fundamentals and Applications
- APPH 4901-3x Applied Physics Undergrad Seminar
- APPH 4018y Applied Physics Lab
- APPH 4010x Introduction to Nuclear Science
- APPH 4200x Physics of Fluids
- APPH 4990y ITER (Graduate Research Seminar)
- APPH 6101x Plasma Physics 2
- APPH 6101x Plasma Physics 1