Alfvén waves discovered by Hannes Alfvén (1942 Nature 150 405) are fundamental electromagnetic oscillations prevalent in magnetically confined plasmas existing in the nature and laboratories. Alfvén waves play important roles in the heating, stability, and transport of magnetized plasmas. The anisotropic nearly incompressible shear Alfvén wave is particularly interesting since, due to inhomogeneities and geometries in realistic plasmas, its wave spectra consist of both the regular discrete and the singular continuous components. In this talk, I will discuss interesting features of the spectral properties of Alfvén waves, spontaneous wave excitations via resonance with energetic particles, and nonlinear physics issues dealing with both wave-particle as well as wave-wave interactions. Examples from both space and laboratory plasmas will be used to illustrate the underlying physics.
Professor Liu Chen received his Bachelor’s degree from National Taiwan University in 1966, and his Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley in 1972. From 1972 to 1974, he was a postdoctoral staff member at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. In 1974, he joined Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory of Princeton University as a research scientist, and, later, also became a faculty member in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences. In 1993, he was appointed a Full Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of University of California at Irvine, and, in March 2012, became an Above-Scale Professor Emeritus. Currently, he is a Professor of Physics and the Director of Institute for Fusion Theory and Simulation of Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. Professor Liu Chen is a theoretical plasma physicist with broad research interests. His current research is focused on waves, instabilities, and turbulence in magnetized laboratory and space plasmas; as well as nonlinear dynamics of coherent high-power radiation devices. In 2004, he received the American Physical Society (APS) Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research. In 2008, he was awarded the Hannes Alfvén Prize by the European Physical Society (EPS). In 2012, he was awarded the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics by APS. He is a Fellow of APS, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), as well as American Geophysical Union (AGU).