Disruption Precursor-to-Actuation Latency Chain

Mitigation only helps if the whole chain from precursor detection to material in the plasma completes inside the disruption's own growth time.

Racing the physics

A disruption gives a fixed, unforgiving time budget set by the current quench and thermal quench timescales. The mitigation chain — detect, decide, arm, fire, transport, effect — must complete inside it. Kronos budgets each link and proves the sum sits below the available time with margin, exactly as the reflex loop budgets its microsecond path.

chain_ms = {
    'precursor_detect':  0.10,   # fast magnetics + real-time analysis
    'arm_decision':      0.05,   # bounded reflex logic
    'injector_open':     0.50,   # valve/pellet mechanism
    'transit_to_plasma': 1.00,   # material flight time
    'radiative_effect':  1.50,   # onset of mitigating radiation
}
total = sum(chain_ms.values())      # 3.15 ms
available = 8.0                     # ms of disruption budget (example)
assert total < available            # with margin
print(round(available-total,2), 'ms margin')

Where the time actually goes

The electronic links — detection and decision — are fast; the slow terms are mechanical and physical: opening an injector, the flight time of gas or pellets, and the finite time for injected material to radiate the stored energy. This is why detection must be early: buying milliseconds at the front of the chain is the only way to afford the mechanical tail.

• Detection latency is minimized by watching fast, robust precursors, not slow integrated ones.
• Injector latency is minimized by pre-arming when avoidance confidence drops.
• Transit latency is fixed by geometry; it is a budgeted constant, not a variable.

The budget is also why avoidance and mitigation are designed as one continuum rather than separate systems. As avoidance confidence falls, the mitigation chain is progressively pre-armed — injectors readied, thresholds tightened — so that the moment a trigger fires, only the irreducible physical delays remain. Time bought at the front of the chain, through earlier and more robust detection, is the only lever that makes the fixed mechanical and transit delays affordable inside the disruption's own clock.

If the analysis shows the chain cannot fit the budget for a given fault class, the answer is earlier detection or faster injectors, never a softer threshold. The chain feeds directly into the disruption mitigation reflex and shares its methodology with the quench protection chain.