Director, Plasma Science and Fusion Center
Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering
Professor of Physics
Nuno Loureiro is Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Professor of Physics, and Director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. He is a theoretical physicist with interests spanning from magnetic confinement fusion to fundamental plasma physics and plasma astrophysics. Loureiro is the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Stix award for Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society, an NSF Career awardee, and was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2022.
A native of Portugal, Loureiro majored in Physics at IST Lisbon. He obtained his PhD from Imperial College London in 2005, and then performed post-doctoral work at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (2005-07) and at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in the UK (2007-09), where he was an inaugural Fusion Research Fellow. Between 2009 and 2015 Loureiro was a researcher at the Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion at IST Lisbon, where he led the Theory and Modelling Group (2013-15).
Loureiro joined MIT in 2016 as an Assistant Professor, was tenured in 2017, and promoted to Full Professor in 2021. In addition to his research and administrative activities, Loureiro teaches core courses in the Plasma Physics and Fusion Graduate Program. He was the recipient of the 2017 and 2020 ANS Faculty PAI Outstanding Professor award, and the 2022 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Magnetic reconnection is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature: solar flares, magnetospheric substorms and the sawtooth and tearing instabilities in tokamaks are just a few examples of fascinating events where reconnection plays a key role. One of my research interests is in understanding the instability of the reconnection site (the “current sheet”) to the formation of multiple magnetic islands (or plasmoids). A review-style discussion of this topic can be found here:
Magnetic reconnection is fundamentally an energy conversion mechanism: energy stored in the magnetic field is channeled into particle acceleration and heating. Another ongoing research direction aims to clarify the mechanisms for energy conversion in weakly collisional plasmas, particularly the importance of linear and nonlinear phase-mixing as electron and ion heating mechanisms. These issues are discussed in the two publications below:
The ability to keep a fusion-temperature plasma well confined is critical to the success of the fusion programme. This is often impaired by turbulence and/or macroscopic instabilities. My research addresses both of these topics.
A key tool in these investigations is the massively parallel code Viriato developed by myself and colleagues. Viriato solves the equations of a 4D physical model known as reduced-gyrokinetics, an asymptotically exact simplification of 5D gyrokinetics. The main aspects of the code and an extensive set of benchmarks can be found here:
A complementary aspect of my research is the confinement of very energetic, fusion-born, alpha particles, which are critical to keep the plasma hot and ensure that fusion can be self-sustained. Alphas can resonate with a particular set of plasma waves (Alfvén waves), leading to their destabilization and ensuing alpha transport away from the plasma core. This issue is of particular importance to ITER, which aims to hold the first-ever burning plasma. A recent publication detailing some aspect of this work is:
In addition to the above, I have an active interest in several fundamental aspects of magnetized plasma dynamics, such as magnetic field generation and amplification, and turbulence in strongly magnetized, weakly collisional plasmas (where again simulations with Viriato play a key role). My publications on these topics (and others) can be found in my google scholar webpage.
Plasma Science and Fusion Center
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, NW17
Cambridge, MA 02139
info@psfc.mit.edu
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