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Helium-Tungsten Interaction in a High-Heat Flux Plasma
The increasing demand of global energy for human being, decreasing availability of natural energy sources and concern about global climate change necessitate the development of novel sustainable energy sources. Fusion energy, the most developing and promising near-term approach to the development of fusion power, is such a source, which is being considered to be the ultimate solution for the far-future increasing demand of energy and the solution to social issues with global environmental concerns. However people are facing so many problems concerning with the present day fusion reactors, three major issues of them can be summarized as: (i) the stable and efficient confinement of hot plasma; (ii) the development of materials for the reactor that can withstand the high neutron flux, and (iii) the exhaust of the power and associated plasma-wall interaction (PWI). The major challenges for studies of PWI in the context of fusion research are to find material surfaces that: (a) have a sufficient lifetime under the steady state atom or molecule and power load, (b) are resistant against short bursts of excessive power load, (c) retain tritium at a sufficiently low rate, and (d) are compatible with the general plasma performance. However, so far, a very few experiments have been performed in fusion plasma devices using tungsten and graphite surfaces focusing primarily on the resulting behavior of the confined plasma, with little investigation of PWIs. In addition to this, recently, the dynamical behaviors and turbulence in plasma jet have paid a considerable attention to the scientists and engineers in plasma science community in order to observe various instabilities and structural formation in microwave plasma jet. These two issues, especially PWIs in fusion devices and electrostatic fluid dynamics are the motivation of the proposed research, in order to obtain high quality plasmas where PWI will be well controlled.