Position: Research Assistant

Supervisors: Prof Sandra Chapman and Prof Richard Dendy

Project Title: Hybrid simulations of flow bursts in magnetically confined plasmas

Funding: EPSRC

Project Outline:

Coherent structures that involve local enhancement or depression of plasma temperature, density and magnetic field strength are ubiquitous in both fusion and space plasmas. In many cases, such as in the edge region of tokamaks, the length scales of gradients associated with these so-called 'blobs' are comparable to the ion Larmour radius. Fully kinetic treatment of ions is therefore neccessary to capture physics that is inaccessible to fluid or guiding-centre models.

In order to simulate the evolution and dynamics of these ion-gyro scale blobs, the key purpose of my project, I have developed a 2D hybrid code which comprises a multi-species particle-in-cell code for the kinetic treatment of the ions, coupled with a massless electron fluid.

---

Publications

P. W. Gingell, S. C. Chapman, R. O. Dendy and C. S. Brady, Transport and evolution of ion gyro-scale plasma blobs in perpendicular magnetic fields, Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, 54 (2012) 065005