How can plasma physicists harness the power of quantum computers? Abhay K. Ram, a PSFC Principal Research Scientist, and his co-authors Efstratios Koukoutsis, Kyriakos Hizanidis, and George Vahala have an answer in their recently published paper called “Dyson maps and unitary evolution for Maxwell equations in tensor dielectric media”.
Recent MIT graduate Francesco Sciortino (MIT PhD’21) has been honored with the 2022 Piovesan Award for the best PhD thesis in "physics of controlled fusion."
Noah Mandell, a postdoctoral fellow at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), is one of two recipients of a 2022 Frederick A. Howes Scholar in Computational Science award.
In a pair of recent publications, Abhilash Mathews begins directly testing the accuracy of a reduced plasma turbulence model in a new way: he combines physics with machine learning.
By incorporating the scattering of radiofrequency waves into fusion simulations, MIT physicists improve heating and current drive predictions for fusion plasmas.
PSFC principal research scientist John Wright will lead an exploration of how machine learning can accelerate radio frequency modeling for current drive prediction in tokamaks.
MIT PSFC hosted its first Computational Physics School for Fusion Research which focused on teaching computational tools that could help young scientists speed their research, much of which rely increasingly on computers when problems cannot be solved analytically, or too much data for one person to process.
NSE graduate student Alex Creely has received the Kyushu University Itoh Project Prize for his poster “Cross-Machine Validation of TGLF and GENE on Alcator C-Mod and ASDEX Upgrade.” The prize recognizes excellence in doctoral student plasma physics research.
Most of these plasmas, including the solar wind that constantly flows out from the sun and sweeps through the solar system, exist in a turbulent state. MIT's Loureiro and Boldyrev have proposed a new model to explain these dynamic turbulent processes.
In his third year at MIT, Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) graduate student Alex Creely has figured out enough about the hot, turbulent plasmas necessary for creating fusion energy that his research has been honored with an Innovations in Fuel Cycle Research Award, offered by the Office of Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Technology R&D of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
Loureiro marvels at how pervasive magnetic fields are, evident not only in planets and the interplanetary medium, but beyond the heliosphere to the interstellar, galactic, intergalactic and intercluster media. But how were these fields generated, and how did they come to have the structure and magnitude they have today?
What drew Loureiro to plasma physics, he says, was energy. “If one is not naïve about today’s world and today’s society, one has to understand that there is an energy problem. And if you’re a physicist, you have the tools to try and do something about it.”
A multi-institutional team consisting of Plasma Science and Fusion Center research scientist Nathan Howard, Chris Holland (University of California, San Diego) and Jeff Candy (General Atomics), has received a prestigious INCITE leadership computing award.
The appointment of Nuno Loureiro as Assistant Professor of NSE will provide an important boost to the theoretical side of how plasmas work – the fundamental building block of fusion energy.
Lee’s article 'Turbulent momentum pinch of diamagnetic flows in a tokamak' is one of 22 papers featured in the Nuclear Fusion 2014 Highlights collection.
Senior Research Engineer and Division Head Dr. Joseph Minervini, will serve as Assistant Director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center beginning November 1, 2015.