Publications by Patrick Blanchard

Experimental Observation of the Motion of Ions in a Resonantly Driven Plasma Wakefield Accelerator

Ambrogio Fasoli, Ivo Furno, Patrick Blanchard, Yanis Andrebe, Riccardo Agnello, Christine Stollberg

We show experimentally that an effect of motion of ions, observed in a plasma-based accelerator, depends inversely on the plasma ion mass. The effect appears within a single wakefield event and manifests itself as a bunch tail, occurring only when sufficie ...

2025

Effect of energetic ions on edge-localized modes in tokamak plasmas

Olivier Sauter, Stefano Coda, Timothy Goodman, Jean-Marc Moret, Duccio Testa, Patrick Blanchard, Holger Reimerdes, Benoît Labit, Christian Gabriel Theiler, Federico Alberto Alfredo Felici

The most efficient and promising operational regime for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor tokamak is the high-confinement mode. In this regime, however, periodic relaxations of the plasma edge can occur. These edge-localized modes pose a ...

2025

Interpretation of divertor ion temperature measurements from an attached towards a detached regime

Basil Duval, Patrick Blanchard, Holger Reimerdes, Christian Gabriel Theiler, Artur Perek, Luke Simons, Christine Stollberg, Olivier Claude Martin Février, Lorenzo Martinelli, Sophie Danielle Angelica Gorno

We present simultaneous profiles of the poloidal distribution of electron temperature and density (Te, ne), the poloidal emissivity distributions of a range of spectral lines together with the corresponding ion temperatures, Ti, in the TCV divertor plasma. ...

2025

Present status of heating neutral beam injection system at TCV

Olivier Sauter, Ambrogio Fasoli, Basil Duval, Stefano Coda, Yves Martin, Patrick Blanchard, Alexander Karpushov, Damien Fasel, Yanis Andrebe, Matthieu Toussaint

The paper describes the operation and upgrade of the Heating Neutral Beam Injection (HNBI) system as well as the related infrastructure at the Tokamak Configuration Variable (TCV) during the last years. In 2023, the installation of new TCV neutron shieldin ...

2025

Hosing of a Long Relativistic Particle Bunch in Plasma

Ambrogio Fasoli, Ivo Furno, Patrick Blanchard, Yanis Andrebe, Riccardo Agnello, Christine Stollberg, Sun Hee Kim, Alban Sublet, Shuai Liu

Experimental results show that hosing of a long particle bunch in plasma can be induced by wakefields driven by a short, misaligned preceding bunch. Hosing develops in the plane of misalignment, selfmodulation in the perpendicular plane, at frequencies clo ...

Amer Physical Soc2024

Experimental research on the TCV tokamak

Olivier Sauter, Ambrogio Fasoli, Stefano Coda, Timothy Goodman, Yves Martin, Stefano Alberti, Ivo Furno, Duccio Testa, Patrick Blanchard, Holger Reimerdes

Tokamak à configuration variable (TCV), recently celebrating 30 years of near-continual operation, continues in its missions to advance outstanding key physics and operational scenario issues for ITER and the design of future power plants such as DEMO. The ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2024

Overview of the EUROfusion Tokamak Exploitation programme in support of ITER and DEMO

Olivier Sauter, Basil Duval, Stefano Coda, Timothy Goodman, Jean-Marc Moret, Duccio Testa, Patrick Blanchard, Holger Reimerdes, Benoît Labit, Christian Gabriel Theiler

Within the 9th European Framework programme, since 2021 EUROfusion is operating five tokamaks under the auspices of a single Task Force called ‘Tokamak Exploitation’. The goal is to benefit from the complementary capabilities of each machine in a coordinat ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2024

Filamentation of a relativistic proton bunch in plasma

Ambrogio Fasoli, Ivo Furno, Patrick Blanchard, Yanis Andrebe, Riccardo Agnello, Christine Stollberg

We show in experiments that a long, underdense, relativistic proton bunch propagating in plasma undergoes the oblique instability, which we observe as filamentation. We determine a threshold value for the ratio between the bunch transverse size and plasma ...

2024

A control oriented strategy of disruption prediction to avoid the configuration collapse of tokamak reactors

Olivier Sauter, Ambrogio Fasoli, Duccio Testa, Patrick Blanchard, Alessandro Pau, Federico Alberto Alfredo Felici, Cristian Sommariva, Umar Sheikh, Henri Weisen, Davide Galassi

The objective of thermonuclear fusion consists of producing electricity from the coalescence of light nuclei in high temperature plasmas. The most promising route to fusion envisages the confinement of such plasmas with magnetic fields, whose most studied ...

Nature Research2024

Development of the self-modulation instability of a relativistic proton bunch in plasma

Ambrogio Fasoli, Ivo Furno, Patrick Blanchard, Yanis Andrebe, Riccardo Agnello, Christine Stollberg, Sun Hee Kim, Ana Francisca Leal Silva Soares, Alban Sublet, Samuel Rey-Mermet

Self-modulation is a beam-plasma instability that is useful to drive large-amplitude wakefields with bunches much longer than the plasma skin depth. We present experimental results showing that, when increasing the ratio between the initial transverse size ...

2023