From Classical to Plasma Tomography

Abstract

This monograph is an attempt at a comprehensive treatment of tomographic reconstruction methods with the special emphasis on the application in fusion research. Therefore, the main volume of the book is devoted to tomographic inversion methods that are either commonly used in the fusion research or they have just been developed and published by me or other researchers. However, detailed explanation and discussion of plasma tomography principles would not have been possible without giving an introduction to classical tomographic reconstruction methods. By these classical methods, I mean here analytical and algebraic methods commonly applied not only in medicine but also in many different fields such as geophysics, bioscience or material science. Inversion methods applied in plasma tomography significantly differ from classical ones. This is mostly due to the nature of the data collected in tomographic experiments carried out with fusion devices. The algebraic reconstruction method, shortly described in Chapter 5, can be considered as a link between classical tomographic methods described in the preceding part of the book and reconstruction methods that are specific to fusion research. In fact, most of the reconstruction methods used in fusion science belong indeed to the class of algebraic methods. However, due to the fact that measured data sets are sparse and the reconstruction problem is strongly ill-posed, specific methods that include a regularisation are required. This is shown and discussed in Chapter 6. My main motivation in publishing this work was a desire to share, with the widest possible readership, a comprehensive monograph on plasma tomography. I would expect the target audience to be primarily academics, with a special emphasis on graduate and PhD students from plasma physics and fusion research community. I hope that this book can serve as a self-contained resource for PhD students wishing to extend their knowledge on plasma tomography. I tried to present as many practical applications as possible, focusing mostly on the recent advances made with tokamak devices. I assume the Reader is familiar with the basic concepts of plasma physics and thermonuclear fusion, as well as with basic mathematical apparatus such as linear algebra. The introductory chapters and proofs of presented theorems should help the Reader to immerse into the ideas presented through the book. For the sake of clarity, some detailed information and additional proofs are postponed to the appendices.