Self Organisation and SOC in the magnetosphere and in laboratory plasma confinement devices

Sandra Chapman
University of Warwick, UK

The concepts of self organisation, and self organised criticality, have recently been invoked as paradigms for plasma confinement systems. Under a variety of external driving these systems release energy in a 'bursty' manner which shows evidence of self similarity (inverse power laws) in their statistics. This seminar will focus on two such systems: the earth's magnetosphere, and tokamak experients; these have very different available phenomenology. The concept of 'sandpile' avalanche models and observational evidence for this type of criticality will be briefly reviewed. The predictions of this statistical approach, and their implications for the physics of the systems, will be discussed.