Tracking Blobs in the Turbulent Edge Plasma of a Tokamak Fusion Device

Autor: Woonghee Han, Randall A. Pietersen, Rafael Villamor-Lora, Matthew Beveridge, Nicola Offeddu, Theodore Golfinopoulos, Christian Theiler, James L. Terry, Earl S. Marmar, Iddo Drori
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2111.08570
Popis: The analysis of turbulence in plasmas is fundamental in fusion research. Despite extensive progress in theoretical modeling in the past 15 years, we still lack a complete and consistent understanding of turbulence in magnetic confinement devices, such as tokamaks. Experimental studies are challenging due to the diverse processes that drive the high-speed dynamics of turbulent phenomena. This work presents a novel application of motion tracking to identify and track turbulent filaments in fusion plasmas, called blobs, in a high-frequency video obtained from Gas Puff Imaging diagnostics. We compare four baseline methods (RAFT, Mask R-CNN, GMA, and Flow Walk) trained on synthetic data and then test on synthetic and real-world data obtained from plasmas in the Tokamak `a Configuration Variable (TCV). The blob regime identified from an analysis of blob trajectories agrees with state-of-the-art conditional averaging methods for each of the baseline methods employed, giving confidence in the accuracy of these techniques. High entry barriers traditionally limit tokamak plasma research to a small community of researchers in the field. By making a dataset and benchmark publicly available, we hope to open the field to a broad community in science and engineering.
Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures
Databáze: OpenAIRE