23/30 Nov 2000

"Blaamann" is an old goat in Norwegian, folklore. A mountain on Kvaløya is named after him, and so is our toroidal plasma device in the physics department. The main project on this device at the moment is to use the Simple Magnetised Torus for studying anomalous transport in magnetized plasma and self-organization phenomena in complex systems.

The first seminar will outline the working of this device and the basics of anomalous (turbulent) transport in magnetized plasma. We will indicate how the plasma dynamics can be modelled, and show some results of numerical simulations and compare them with experiments. Emphasis will be put on demonstrating the existence of critical gradients and marginal stability.

Having described the experimental reality, and the specific dynamics of this particular experiment, the second seminar will approach the question of universal aspects of transport in driven-dissipative systems. The viewpoint will be that of an experimentalist; can I make some sense of my data, that trancends the peculiarities of the particular experiment? In this context I discuss some elementary aspects of fractal analysis of time-series and (the rather vague) concept of self-organized criticality. I also briefly review the attempts that so far have been made to apply this concept to understand universal features of transport in fusion plasmas.