Muni Zhou

Graduate Student

617-995-9472

NW16-258

Biography

Muni Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate in the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering working at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center in the Loureiro group. Her thesis work is focused on understanding the origin of large-scale cosmic magnetic fields. Originally from China, she completed a Bachelor of Science in Physics at Zhejiang University before coming to MIT.

 

Research

Muni's thesis work focuses on understanding the generation of macroscopic cosmic magnetic fields, in particular, those that originate from microscopic kinetic fluctuations. This problem involves the understanding of the long-term behaviour of the Weibel instability that robustly generates magnetic seed fields at minuscule scales, the dynamo in collisionless plasmas and the inverse cascade in turbulence mediated by magnetic reconnection.

Muni Zhou is also interested in the application of plasma physics to controlled nuclear fusion, where she has done various projects including the saturation of Alfvén mode in tokamaks, designing diagnostics for high-field tokamaks and the performance of a novel linear device.

 

Publications

 M. Zhou, N.F. Loureiro and D.A. Uzdensky, Multi-scale dynamics of magnetic flux tubes and inverse magnetic energy transfer, arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.07291 (2020). 

M. Zhou, P. Bhat, N.F. Loureiro and D.A. Uzdensky, Magnetic island merger as a mechanism for inverse magnetic energy transfer, Phys. Rev. Research 1, 012004(R) (2019).

R.A. Tinguely, A. Rosenthal, R. Simpson, S.B. Ballinger, A.J. Creely, S. Frank, A.Q. Kuang, B.L. Linehan, W. McCarthy, L.M. Milanese, K.J. Montes, T. Mouratidis, J.F. Picard, P. Rodriguez-Fernandez, A.J. Sandberg, F. Sciortino, E.A. Tolman, {\bf M. Zhou}, B.N. Sorbom, Z.S. Hartwig and A.E. White, Neutron diagnostics for the physics of a high-field, compact, >1 tokamak, Fusion Engineering and Design 143, 212-225 (2019).

M. Zhou and R. White, Collisional dependence of Alfvén mode saturation in tokamaks, Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, 58(12), 125006 (2016).

 

Teaching

TA for 22.15 Essential Numerical Methods

 

Talks & Media

Demonstrating the fundamentals of fusion (PSFC News) 

Reaching in and out at the APS DPP meeting (PSFC News)

NSE 2018 graduate research expo (NSE News)