How Does Quantum Turbulence Affect Plasma in a Tokamak?

[andrew848]

TL;DR Summary

I was reading that the most powerful gamma ray burst experienced a 'drag' due to quantum turbulence and wondered how this could effect a plasma.

Summary: I was reading that the most powerful gamma ray burst experienced a 'drag' due to quantum turbulence and wondered how this could effect a plasma.

After reading this Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRB_080916C I noticed the part about how the light was slowed down by the quantum turbulence of space time, This got me thinking. I was wondering how much a vacuum could influence turbulence of a plasma in say a tokamak? Could you find a way to influence space time into a more organized state like how a plasma actuator has been proposed to reduce drag on a plane? If so, could a more efficient tokamak be created? reducing turbulence and create a path of least resistance for the plasma to follow. If you could find parameters for the plasma to generate this effect on its own and create a vacuum turbulence gradient between the reactors walls (high vacuum turbulence) and in the plasma itself (low vacuum turbulence) to aid in confinement.

Even if the tokamak idea doesn't hold up its still curious to think how the vacuum itself could influence a plasma.

Bonus points if you are board and some food for thought, Could a simalure vain of thought be applied to a space ship. Could you control the vacuum fluctuations to create a so called warp drive or even align space in such a way to get passed the speed of light.

 

[ZapperZ]

Summary: I was reading that the most powerful gamma ray burst experienced a 'drag' due to quantum turbulence and wondered how this could effect a plasma.

After reading this Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRB_080916C I noticed the part about how the light was slowed down by the quantum turbulence of space time, This got me thinking. I was wondering how much a vacuum could influence turbulence of a plasma in say a tokamak? Could you find a way to influence space time into a more organized state like how a plasma actuator has been proposed to reduce drag on a plane? If so, could a more efficient tokamak be created? reducing turbulence and create a path of least resistance for the plasma to follow. If you could find parameters for the plasma to generate this effect on its own and create a vacuum turbulence gradient between the reactors walls (high vacuum turbulence) and in the plasma itself (low vacuum turbulence) to aid in confinement.

Even if the tokamak idea doesn't hold up its still curious to think how the vacuum itself could influence a plasma.

Bonus points if you are board and some food for thought, Could a simalure vain of thought be applied to a space ship. Could you control the vacuum fluctuations to create a so called warp drive or even align space in such a way to get passed the speed of light.

First of all, I attended a presentation by a PI of this project before the published this and while they were still under an embargo while they wait for the Science paper to appear. Not once was there any connection made between the "delay" and "quantum gravity", etc.

Secondly, you really shouldn't be jumping to all these conclusions AND start to apply elsewhere until this connect has been established. Even during the initial media release, there were caution being given out that this delay, if it is real, can be explained by many other things. Even the Sky and Telescope article linked in that Wikipedia entry stated it plainly:

For instance, maybe bursters really do emit their highest-energy photons a few seconds after the rest. Ruling this out will require observing many more GRBs — in particular, to see whether the amount of the delay scales with the distance of the burst, and not with any intrinsic characteristic of the event itself. "Burst emissions at these energies are still poorly understood, and Fermi is giving us the tools to figure them out," says LAT lead scientist Peter Michelson of Stanford University, whose team reports its results in the February 19th Science Express.

Also note that the Fermi telescope was part of the conglomerate that looked at the recent GRB along with LIGO, and nothing there considered out of the ordinary other than the monumental event of the merging of optical and gravitational astronomy.

Fermi telescope has looked at GRBs for 10 years now, and as far as I can tell, no connection has been made of their observations with such quantum gravity/quantum foam effects. If you have a proper publication (as in published papers) that have made newer advancement on this front, I'd like to see the reference.

Zz.

 

[mfb]

I moved the thread to "other physics topics". It doesn't fit to particle physics but I also don't know where else it would fit.

Summary: I was reading that the most powerful gamma ray burst experienced a 'drag' due to quantum turbulence and wondered how this could effect a plasma.

I was wondering how much a vacuum could influence turbulence of a plasma in say a tokamak?

Not at all. The two things have nothing to do with each other, even if the delay is actually from something new and not just from the details of the burst.

Nothing we create on Earth comes anywhere close to the photon energy recorded from this GRB, and even at this energy these speculative theories only expect a few seconds delay after 12 billion years of travel time.

Even if the tokamak idea doesn't hold up its still curious to think how the vacuum itself could influence a plasma.

It doesn't.