Plasma Transport Theory
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this graduate-level course on how mass, momentum, and energy move through plasmas, with emphasis on magnetic confinement fusion. Lecture material covers the Fokker-Planck collision operator and its limiting forms, collisional relaxation, and equilibrium, worked through applications including a Lorentz gas, Brownian motion, alpha particles, and runaway electrons. The Braginskii formulation of classical collisional transport in general geometry is derived from the Fokker-Planck equation, followed by neoclassical transport in tokamaks across the Pfirsch-Schluter, banana, and plateau collisionality regimes, where magnetic geometry shapes the results. As with MIT OCW courses generally, materials are free to access, including any available lecture notes, problem sets, and readings, with no certificate offered. The course sits within MIT's Nuclear Science and Engineering curriculum and assumes prior background in plasma physics.