Earl Marmar, Academic Staff

Name: Earl Marmar
Title: Senior Research Scientist
Email: marmar@psfc.mit.edu
Phone: (617) 253-5455
Office: MIT Department of Physics
77 Massachusetts Avenue, NW17-186
Cambridge, MA 02139

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Research Interests

Atomic physics and spectroscopy of low, medium and high ~Z ions, and particle transport and plasma wall interactions in tokamak plasmas.

Biographical Sketch

Dr. Earl Marmar received his Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University in 1977. During his graduate research at Princeton, he helped to develop a technique to introduce an intense beam of low energy neutral atoms into the edge of a tokamak plasma discharge that has found subsequent application in fusion related experiments worldwide. In the late 1970s, working on the Alcator A tokamak at MIT, Dr. Marmar was the co-discoverer of the edge plasma radiative condensation phenomenon which has come to be known as the MARFE. From 1984-87, Dr. Marmar’s research on Alcator C included the first unambiguous observations of charge transfer, from excited neutral hydrogen to highly stripped impurity ions in a tokamak plasma, and the lamb shift in the ground state of hydrogen-like argon was measured with unprecedented precision. In his experiments on Alcator C-Mod, Li pellet imaging is being used to measure internal poloidal magnetic field profiles and plasma turbulence.

Dr. Marmar has served on a number of advisory panels for the Department of Energy, including the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee. He is currently a member of the University Fusion Association Executive Committee. In July 2003, Dr. Marmar was named Head of the Alcator C-Mod Project.

Awards and Honors

  • 1987 – American Physical Society Fellow “For outstanding contributions to the study of impurities in toroidal plasmas, including characterization of impurity transport and use of impurities for diagnostics.”

Selected Publications

  • Overview of recent Alcator C-Mod research, E.S. Marmar, B. Bai, R.L. Boivin, P.T. Bonoli, et al., Nuclear Fusion 43(2003), in press.
  • Measurements of large poloidal variations of impurity density in the Alcator C-Mod H-mode barrier region, T.S. Pedersen, R.S. Granetz, E.S. Marmar, D. Mossessian, J.W. Hughes, I.H. Hutchinson, J. Terry, and J.E. Rice, Physics of Plasmas 9(2002)4188.
  • Double transport barrier plasmas in Alcator C-Mod, J.E. Rice, P.T. Bonoli, E.S. Marmar, S.J. Wukitch, R.L. Boivin, C.L. Fiore, R.S. Granetz, M.J. Greenwald, A.E. Hubbard, J.W. Hughes, I.H. Hutchinson, J.H. Irby, Y. Lin, D. Mossessian, M. Porkolab, G. Schilling, J.A. Snipes and S.M. Wolfe, Nuclear Fusion 42(2002)510.
  • X-ray observations of 2l-nl’ transitions and configuration-interaction effects from Kr, Mo, Nb and Zr in near neon-like charge states from tokamak plasmas, J.E. Rice, K.B. Fournier, J.A. Goetz, E.S. Marmar and J.L. Terry, Journal of Physics B 33(2000)5435.
  • Precision measurement of the 1s Lamb shift in hydrogen-like argon, E.S. Marmar, J.E. Rice, E. Kallne, J. Kallne and R.E. LaVilla, Physical Review A 33(1986)774.
  • Observation of charge-transfer population of high-n levels in Ar+16 from neutral hydrogen in the ground and excited states in a tokamak plasma, J.E. Rice, E.S. Marmar, J.L. Terry, E. Kallne and J. Kallne, Physical Review Letters 56(1986)50.