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Fusion plasmas

Chaos cuts ELMs down to size

Plasma instabilities known as edge-localized modes present a significant challenge to the development of next-generation fusion reactors. But by inducing small perturbations in the magnetic fields that confine fusion plasmas, such instabilities could become a thing of the past.

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Figure 1: Magnetic plasma confinement in a tokamak.

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Loarte, A. Chaos cuts ELMs down to size. Nature Phys 2, 369–370 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys331

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