Research & Labs

This section contains lab reports, research papers and posters, and personal projects.

My current project is a Farnswirth-Hirsch fusor type plasma confinement reactor. This kind of reactor is a vacuum pressure, hydrogen gas chamber that contains a high voltage grid that ionizes the gas into a plasma. Different geometries of the grid results in different plasma confinement geometries.

Currently I have developed code that uses a Poisson (Laplace due to free charges being sparse between electrodes) with Dirichlet boundary conditions -> E field and electric potential -> Boris pusher (ion integrator that reduces to a leapfrog in a B = 0 scenario) -> plasma density and confinement magnetohydrodynamics simulations workflow. The goal of the code is to optimize different grid geometries for plasma ball or plasma jet sustainance within the fusor.

Completed projects include coursework from UC Berkeley Astrophysics undergraduate work in the Radio Astronomy Lab, Quantum Computing research course, and graduate optical engineering course. These projects are structured as lab reports, research papers, and presentations. Much of the code relevant to these projects can be found at github.com/averybooks.