Basic Plasma Science Facility

This proposal seeks to operate the Basic Plasma Science Facility (BaPSF) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as an open DOE Collaborative Research Facility, supporting both the host research program of the BaPSF scientific staff and collaborative (user) research effort. Experimental runtime is allotted to external researchers from universities, national laboratories and industry through peer review process during an annual call for runtime proposals. BaPSF will continue to improve scientific instrumentation, providing the scientific community access to unique research devices and diagnostic tools that permit the exploration of a wide range of fundamental plasma problems that impact topics at the frontiers of plasma science, fusion, space science, and plasma technology. The broad parameter ranges accessible in the plasma devices operated at BaPSF allow studies that span microscopic phenomena on the fast electron time scales (e.g., electron plasma waves, cyclotron radiation) to the slow time scales characteristic of plasma transport driven by drift-wave turbulence and long wavelength magnetic fluctuations. Efforts will continue to maintain BaPSF with enough flexibility to address frontier scientific issues that cut across multiple disciplines within plasma science, such as collisionless shocks, 3D reconnection, turbulence and transport, radiation belt physics, solar and stellar wind turbulence, and solar atmospheric transport and turbulence. The BaPSF research modalities accommodate a range of options - single user research projects, theory-driven studies involving data analyses and interpretations, and topical campaigns to pursue a common set of problems of contemporary interest. The campaigns involve experimentalists, theoreticians, modelers, and also the BaPSF scientific and technical staff.