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Chio Z. (Frank)
Cheng is the Head of the Energetic Particle Physics Group and also the Head
of the Space Plasma Physics Division, Theory Department at the Princeton
Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), Princeton University. He is a member of
the Theory Department Steering Committee, a PPPL Distinguished Research
Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Dr. Cheng's area of
expertise is in theoretical and computational plasma physics with
applications in fusion research and space physics. He has over 180
publications on laboratory and space plasma physics and has presented more
than 40 invited talks at major conferences. In laboratory plasma physics,
he has made major contributions in theories of Alfven waves, kinetic
ballooning modes, energetic particle effects on sawtooth stabilization and
fishbone mode excitation, drift waves and trapped particle modes and plasma
transport, and the development of a kinetic-fluid model. In particular, he
is the inventor of the toroidicity-induced Alfven eigenmode (TAE) in 1985,
which has since been widely observed in toroidal confinement experiments.
He is the co-discoverer of the toroidicity-induced drift wave in 1980,
which is important in understanding drift wave instabilities in tokamaks.
In 1977 he discovered the nonlinear generation of convective cells by drift
wave instabilities, which is important in understanding anomalous plasma
transport in toroidal fusion devices.
In space plasma physics, he has made major
contributions in magnetospheric physics and solar physics. In
magnetospheric physics he discovered a low frequency instability that
triggered magnetospheric substorms observed by the AMPTE/CCE satellite and
developed a theory of kinetic ballooning instability to explain the
observations; developed a theory of mirror-ballooning instability to
explain the excitation mechanism of Pc 4-5 waves and their magnetic
field-aligned wave structure observed by multiple satellites; developed
theories of kinetic Alfven waves and global mirror modes to understand MHD
wave activity in the magnetopause-magnetosheath; proposed a model to
understand energetic particle injection observed at geosynchronous orbit
during substorm events; provided a physical model for calculating
three-dimensional global structures of Earth's magnetosphere; and developed
a kinetic-fluid model that forms the foundation for analytical theories and
numerical simulation for understanding multi-scale phenomena in high beta
plasmas in general geometries. In solar physics he has developed a new
theoretical model for understanding the physical process of solar flares
revealed in soft X-Ray and Hard X-Ray emissions observed by the Japanese
Yohkoh satellite; and new theoretical models to understand the formation of
solar prominence.
In computational physics he has made
pioneering contributions in the development of a family of the
non-variational (NOVA) global stability and wave propagation codes for
toroidal plasmas including particle kinetic and resistivity effects; the
development of three-dimensional particle simulation codes for studying
anomalous transport in toroidal and cylindrical geometries; the invention
of an efficient numerical method (splitting scheme) for solving
three-dimensional Vlasov-Maxwell equations numerically; and the development
of a three-dimensional global equilibrium code for studying quasi-steady
global structure of the Earth's magnetosphere.
Link to
CV, publication list, space physics activity, etc.
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