Magnetic confinement fusion research

Magnetic confinement fusion research investigates how to trap and sustain hydrogen plasma at extreme temperatures—exceeding one hundred million degrees—long enough for fusion reactions to release net energy, primarily using doughnut-shaped devices called tokamaks. The central challenge is controlling the plasma's tendency to lose heat and particles through turbulent transport, driven by instabilities such as edge localized modes, neoclassical tearing modes, and small-scale drift-wave turbulence that collectively limit confinement performance. Researchers are actively working to understand how self-organized structures called zonal flows can suppress this turbulence, and how magnetohydrodynamic stability constraints interact with the high-energy particle populations that will be abundant in a burning plasma. Bridging the gap between theoretical and computational models of these phenomena and measurements from operating devices like ITER—currently under construction—remains one of the field's defining open problems.

Works

9,281,702

Total citations

2,576,055

Keywords

TurbulenceTokamakTransportMHD StabilityEdge Localized ModesZonal Flows