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Millisecond-Scale Neural Operator Surrogates for Double-Null Free-Boundary Grad-Shafranov Equilibria

Plasma Physics 2026-08-06 v1 Nuclear Experiment Computational Physics

Abstract

The Grad-Shafranov (GS) equation governs ideal magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium in tokamak plasmas. Free-boundary GS solvers are central to diverted-equilibrium modeling, but nonlinear Picard iteration introduces computational cost and sample-dependent latency that can become prohibitive in optimization, modeling, and control-oriented loops. Here we train a geometrically conditioned Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) to learn a constrained forward map from spatial coordinates, scalar operating parameters (Paxis,Ip,fvac)(P_{\mathrm{axis}}, I_p, f_{\mathrm{vac}}), and prescribed X-point locations to the poloidal-flux field ψ(R,Z)\psi(R,Z). The model is trained on a controlled family of constrained double-null free-boundary equilibria generated with \textsc{FreeGS} for a single fixed machine geometry and prescribed topology. The best model achieves a mean relative L2L^2 error of 0.05%0.05\%, with test error following an empirical N0.68N^{-0.68} power law over Ntrain{500,1000,2000,5000}N_{\mathrm{train}}\in\{500,1000,2000,5000\}. It recovers both X-points to within 0.20.2 cm and localizes the O-point to 0.030.03 cm. As a physics-consistency diagnostic, the predicted fields satisfy an external finite-difference GS residual evaluation at the same level as the ground-truth fields, with mean normalized residual 2.292.29, indistinguishable from the 2.29±0.062.29\pm0.06 \textsc{FreeGS} baseline using the same diagnostic. The trained FNO evaluates one equilibrium in 2.772.77 ms on GPU and 25.625.6 ms on CPU, corresponding to speedups of 640×{\sim}640\times and 69×{\sim}69\times relative to \textsc{FreeGS} as configured here, with near-deterministic latency (p95/median =1.01=1.01). These results show that neural-operator surrogates can provide accurate, geometrically precise, millisecond-scale equilibrium evaluations for magnetic-confinement fusion workflows within a prescribed topology and machine geometry.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2608.05555,
  title  = {Millisecond-Scale Neural Operator Surrogates for Double-Null Free-Boundary Grad-Shafranov Equilibria},
  author = {Plamen G. Krastev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.05555},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

13 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables