Speaker: Walter Strauss (Brown University)

Title: Stability of a Hot Plasma in a Torus

Abstract: In a tokamak huge numbers of charged particles whiz around a torus
at relativistic speeds. Finding stable particle configurations is
the holy grail of fusion energy research. We model a collisionless
plasma by the relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell system. There are many
equilibria, of which some are stable and some unstable. In this talk I
will present recent work with Toan Nguyen where the particles reflect
specularly and the field is a perfect conductor.  These are however not
the physical boundary conditions. Given an equilibrium of a certain type,
we reduce linear stability to the positivity of a certain non-local linear
operator which is much less complicated than the generator of the full
linearized system.