Magnetic Bottle Without Walls: Levitated Rings for Studying Plasma Instabilities

Describing the turbulent motion of fluids has challenged researchers for more than a century, even as these flows are ubiquitous in daily life. Plasmas also display turbulent behavior similar to that of neutral fluids, but with the added complexity of electromagnetic effects. In both cases, the turbulent flows are made up of eddies at many scales which interact with each other via com-plex nonlinear processes. Despite decades of development in theory, simulation, and experiment, we still lack a complete understanding of turbulent systems. This book will focus on experiments describing the wave-wave interactions between electrostatic fluctuations in a turbulent plasma con-fined by a dipolar magnetic field, how those interactions can be changed by feedback or injected waves, and characterize the intermittency of both the fluctuation power and the transfer of that power between frequencies via three-wave coupling.