Non-linear Terahertz driving of plasma waves in layered cuprates

The hallmark of superconductivity is the rigidity of the quantum-mechanical phase of electrons, responsible for superfluid behavior and Meissner effect. The strength of the phase stiffness is set by the Josephson coupling, which is strongly anisotropic in layered cuprates. So far, THz light pulses have been used to achieve non-linear control of the out-of-plane Josephson plasma mode, whose frequency lies in the THz range. However, the high-energy in-plane plasma mode has been considered insensitive to THz pumping. Here, we show that THz driving of both low-frequency and high-frequency plasma waves is possible via a general two-plasmon excitation mechanism. The anisotropy of the Josephson couplings leads to markedly different thermal effects for the out-of-plane and in-plane response, linking in both cases the emergence of non-linear photonics across Tc to the superfluid stiffness. Our results show that THz light pulses represent a preferential knob to selectively drive phase excitations in unconventional superconductors.

Simulation of a high proton temperature plasma toroidal magnetic trap to be used in proton-11B fusion

Several tokamaks structures containing 500 keV protons to be used in P-B11 fusion were simulated. In order to find the optimal confinement configuration, the simulation was helped by an evolutionary algorithm running 145,000 simulations. The results are presented in this paper. According to the simulations the tokamak structure can be operated to reach ignition using the proposed plasma mode that includes the use of low electron temperature and high thermal energy protons in the plasma (500 keV).

Deep Impurities with Collision Delay

The linearised nonlocal kinetic equation is solved analytically for impurity scattering. The resulting response function provides the conductivity, plasma oscillation and Fermi momentum. It is found that virial corrections nearly compensate the wave-function renormalizations rendering the conductivity and plasma mode unchanged. Due to the appearance of the correlated density, the Luttinger theorem does not hold and the screening length is influenced. Explicit results are given for a typical semiconductor. Elastic scattering of electrons by impurities is the simplest but still very interesting dissipative mechanism in semiconductors. Its simplicity follows from the absence of the impurity dynamics, so that individual collisions are described by the motion of an electron in a fixed potential.