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Radiation transport plays important roles in stellar atmospheres, but the effects of turbulence are being obscured by other effects such as stratification. Using radiative hydrodynamic simulations of forced turbulence, we determine the…
Tokamak turbulence, driven by the ion-temperature gradient and occurring in the presence of flow shear, is investigated by means of local, ion-scale, electrostatic gyrokinetic simulations (with both kinetic ions and electrons) of the…
Fusion performance in tokamaks hinges critically on the efficacy of the Edge Transport Barrier (ETB) at suppressing energy losses. The new concept of fingerprints is introduced to identify the instabilities that cause the transport losses…
Differential rotation is known to suppress linear instabilities in fusion plasmas. However, even in the absence of growing eigenmodes, subcritical fluctuations that grow transiently can lead to sustained turbulence. Here transient growth of…
We are developing a new continuum gyrokinetic code, Gkeyll, for use in edge plasma simulations, and here present initial simulations of turbulence on open field lines with model sheath boundary conditions. The code implements an energy…
A first-principles scaling law, based on turbulent transport considerations, and a multi-machine database of density limit discharges from the ASDEX Upgrade, JET and TCV tokamaks, show that the increase of the boundary turbulent transport…
Continued improvement of heat control in mesoscopic conductors brings novel tools for probing strongly correlated electron phenomena. Motivated by these advances, we comprehensively study transport due to a temperature bias in a quantum…
An analytic equilibrium, the Toroidal Bessel Function Model, is used in conjunction with the gyrokinetic code GYRO to investigate the nature of microinstabilities in a reversed field pinch (RFP) plasma. The effect of the normalized electron…
It is shown that a considerable improvement in the global gyrokinetic electromagnetic simulations can be achieved by a slight modification of the simulation scheme. The new scheme is verified, simulating a Toroidal Alfv\'en Eigenmode in…
Accurate modeling of core instabilities in tokamak plasmas is essential to understand the underlying physical mechanisms and their impact on plasma confinement. The ideal stability of the internal kink mode and the m = 1 collisionless…
Low dimensional structures have demonstrated improved thermoelectric (TE) performance because of a drastic reduction in their thermal conductivity, {\kappa}l. This has been observed for a variety of materials, even for traditionally poor…
Breaking the up-down symmetry of the tokamak poloidal cross-section can significantly increase the spontaneous rotation due to turbulent momentum transport. In this work, we optimize the shape of flux surfaces with both tilted elongation…
Nuclear fusion is an attractive source of energy because the fuel is abundant and it produces low levels of carbon emissions. The tokamak, which confines a plasma using magnetic fields, is the most mature nuclear fusion reactor concept.…
In previous work we provided the explicit form of the nonlinear PDEs, subjected to the appropriate boundary conditions, which have to be satisfied by transport coefficients for systems out of Onsager's region. Since the proposed PDEs are…
Gyrokinetics is a rich and rewarding playground to study some of the mysteries of modern physics. In this thesis I present work, motivated by the quest for fusion energy, which seeks to uncover some of the inner workings of turbulence in…
Within integrated tokamak plasma modelling, turbulent transport codes are typically the computational bottleneck limiting their routine use outside of post-discharge analysis. Neural network (NN) surrogates have been used to accelerate…
In magnetically confined fusion plasmas, the role played by zonal E$\times$B flow shear layers in the suppression of turbulent transport is relatively well-understood. However, less is understood about the role played by the weak shear…
In this work, we investigate the dynamics of plasma blobs in the edge of magnetic confinement devices using a full-f gyrokinetic particle-in-cell code with X-point geometry. In simulations, the evolution of a seeded blob is followed as it…
We investigate the impact of spatial topology in 3+1 dimensional causal dynamical triangulations (CDT) by performing numerical simulations with toroidal spatial topology instead of the previously used spherical topology. In the case of…
Geodesic acoustic modes (GAMs) are studied by means of the gyrokinetic global particle-in-cell code ORB5. Linear electromagnetic simulations in the low electron beta limit have been performed, in order to separate acoustic and Alfv\'enic…