Room TBD
Speaker: Dr. Josefine Proll, Max Planck IPP
Title: Physics understanding of instabilities and turbulence for stellarator optimisation
Abstract:
Stellarators, the twisted siblings of tokamaks, have historically suffered from confining the heat of the plasma insufficiently compared with tokamaks and were therefore considered to be less promising candidates for a fusion reactor. This has changed, however, with the advent of stellarators like Wendelstein 7-X, in which the neoclassical transport is reduced by shaping the magnetic field accordingly. As in tokamaks, the turbulent transport remains as the now dominant transport channel.
In this talk I want to give an overview of what we know about turbulent transport and the underlying instabilities in stellarator geometry. I will show theories that have allowed to optimise for improved linear stability, and will discuss why the linear physics is not sufficient to faithfully optimise for turbulent transport. I will then present the concept of available energy as a measure for turbulent transport, and sketch which parts of turbulence we still need to understand.
Bio: Josefine Proll leads the Stellarator Transport Modelling group at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany, and is a part-time associate professor at Eindhoven University of Technology. Her research focuses on understanding plasma instabilities and turbulence in stellarators, and using that understanding to guide magnetic field optimisation. Her work combines theory, numerical simulations, and collaboration with experimentalists on Wendelstein 7-X. She held a postdoctoral fellowship within the Max Planck–Princeton Center for Plasma Physics and joined Eindhoven’s faculty in 2017, before taking up her current group leadership role in 2024.
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Seminar Access: In-person seminars are only available to CU ID holders. Non-Columbia affiliates can contact [email protected] if you'd like the seminar Zoom link.