Irreversible processes in a magnetoplasma (Q1330841)

Magnetically confined plasmas exhibit some interesting instabilities that have somewhat bedeviled the long quest for fusion power in tokamak machines. The magnetic fields employed are strong in the sense that the parameter \(\overline \omega \equiv \omega_ c \tau\), where \(\omega_ c\) is the cyclotron frequency and \(\tau\) is the collision interval, is a very large number. The purpose of the paper is to relate these instabilities to the entropy production rate per unit volume.