Electron Cyclotron Heating of Plasmas

As nuclear fusion becomes an increasingly important potential energy source in these times of global oil and energy crises, the development of technologies that can lead to the realization of this virtually inexhaustible source of energy takes on ever greater urgency. Over the past decade electron cyclotron heating has undergone a significant maturation and has emerged as an essential component of the major approaches to achieving controlled nuclear fusion. The present monograph addresses the ECH physics critical to the international fusion reactor experiment, ITER, but also presents the fundamentals of ECH that are essential to its successful implementation in applications that range from active experiments in planetary magnetospheres to commercial plasma sources for the manufacture of computer chips. The book seeks to convey the physics of ECH in an orderly and coherent fashion to a professional audience by presenting the basic theoretical foundations and then using this theory to interpret a number of established experimental results.
Exercises are included to aid the reader in making the theory more concrete.