School of Physics, Engineering and Technology
Microwave physics
Contact people: Roddy Vann
Microwaves in the range 10-200GHz are used in tokamaks for both diagnostics & heating: the plasma’s spontaneous emission of microwaves is used to measure temperature fluctuations; the reflection (or back-scattering) of an illuminating microwave beam is used to locate or characterise the reflecting surface; high-power microwaves are injected into the plasma to heat it and to drive currents (either in the core or to increase the plasma’s stability). At the York Plasma Institute, we are involved in a range of projects developing & exploiting novel microwave diagnostics and undertaking complementary large-scale simulations on tier-0 supercomputers. We are collaborating with local company Sylatech Ltd on the development of a microwave imaging system for medical applications (funded by an InnovateUK Knowledge Transfer Partnership). In addition to experiments on international fusion experiments, our diagnostic development is supported in a microwave and instrumentation laboratory equipped with a vector network analyser, independent microwave source (both specified up to 26.5GHz) and an anechoic microwave test chamber. For details of selected research highlights, please follow the following links: Synthetic Aperture Microwave Imaging and Full Wave Simulations.