Recent posts
364. Thermonuclear reactors. More on inertial confinement
Last time I did not quite finish with the discussion of physics of inertial confinement, so let me continue… An important parameter that characterizes plasma in reactors with inertial confinement is the ratio between the geometric size of the region where reactions take place and the mean free path of -particles. It basically determines the [...]
363. Vector inflation
Alexey Golovnev is a research associate in the Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics , U. of Munich. Dmitry. I would like to blog about the recently proposed model of vector inflation, Golovnev, Mukhanov, Vanchurin, arXiv:0802.2068. (See also Golovnev, Mukhanov, Vanchurin, arXiv:0810.4304 and Golovnev, Vanchurin, arXiv:0903.2977 for further developments.) Inflation is one of the basic [...]
362. Kepler sees first light
Star cluster NGC6791 from the Kepler’s first light image Just a small part of Kepler’s field of view. The star in the center of the field is known to have large Jupiter-like planet called TrES-2. Just wanted to let you know (if you did not hear about that already), that Kepler has just seen the [...]
361. NEQNET: first two weeks of April
Well, it seems that other two weeks have passed… What’s up? First of all, it looks like I figured out why energy seems to dissipate inhomogeneously in a turbulent flow with very large Reynolds numbers (kindly see the list N4 below). Apart from this topic, other things that I was interested in during these two [...]
360. ISS Tour: video of the day
A great International Space Station tour by Col. Michael Fincke, commander of 18th expedition. The view from station’s windows will blow your mind. Michael is a lot of fun, while Yuri Lonchakov is way too serious (I saw several videos of him at this point, and it seems that he is always like that ) [...]
359. Michael Griffin to fill professor’s position in Alabama
The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAHuntsville) has named Michael Griffin, one of the world’s leading aerospace engineers, as an eminent scholar and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. The announcement was made today by President David Williams. In 2005, Dr. Griffin was appointed as the 11th NASA Administrator, serving in that role until [...]
358. Thermonuclear reactors. Inertial confinement
I am currently keeping studying thermonuclear fusion and reactors a bit and, I should admit, I’m absolutely in love with HiPER and inertial confinement as an idea – it is so much more elegant than magnetic confinement used in Tokamaks… But before I’ll turn to the discussion of inertial confinement reactors, let me finish with [...]
357. Vortex line representation. Coulomb interaction of vortex lines
After brief introduction into vortex line representation we are probably ready to discuss the interaction of vortex lines between each other. But before I proceed to the actual derivation, let me focus for a bit on not so terribly popular (but powerful) formulation of ideal hydrodynamics – Hamiltonian formulation. The Lagrangian of incompressible fluid (I [...]
356. Cosmological parameters in the context of time varying w
Rahul Biswas is a graduate student in Benjamin Wandelt’s research group working on estimation of cosmological parameters. His main interests also include models of dark energy and supernova cosmology. Dmitry. Let me start by saying that I highly appreciate Dmitry’s idea of having this online journal club. I hope to learn something from the discussions [...]
355. Introduction into thermonuclear reactors
After a brief layman review of the theory of thermonuclear fusion let me get more practical and discuss a bit how thermonuclear reactors are supposed to work. Basically, we want the energy release of the thermonuclear reactor to be larger than the energy we pump into the reactor. Depending on a particular scenario of the [...]