STABILITY PROBLEMS IN CERTAIN PLASMA CONFIGURATIONS

Abstract

The thesis entitled 'STABILITY PROBLEMS IN CERTAIN PLASMA CONFIGURATIONS' is presented in six chapters. Chapter one is introductory in nature. This chapter gives a brief history of the phasewise development of plasma theory and provides some basic aspects of the plasma physics. Also, the concept of plasma and inherent instabilties is introduced and general methods used to analyse the problem of plasma instabilities are discussed. The contents of the thesis which form the main contributions are divided into two parts, namely A and B. Part A contains two chapters dealing with the linear stability problems and one chapter dealing with plasma diffusion due to impurity driven MHD modes. Part B contains two chapters dealing with nonlinear stability analysis. The brief outlines of the research work presented in the thesis chapterwise are as follows: In chapter 2, we have discussed drift Kelvin Helmholtz instabilities in the presence of equilibrium electric and magnetic fields which are perpendicular to each other. The following four cases of these instabilities are taken up. 1) finite (3 plasma with homogeneous density and temperature 11) Low J3 electrostatic case ill) High ft case with hetrogeneous density IV Alfvenic instabilities. Adopting the usual procedure, normal mode analysis, disperSion relations are obtained for all the cases. Stability conditions are worked out and discussed. Specific conditions are derived to study the effect of the equilibrium electric field.