Following recent observations of unstable Toroidal Alfven Eigenmodes (TAEs) in a counter-current Neutral Beam Injection (NBI) scenario developed in TCV, an in-depth analysis of the impact of such modes on the global confinement and performance is carried o ...
Electron-Cyclotron waves are routinely used in tokamaks to heat the plasma and to drive current through the electron channel. Their unique ability to drive very localized current renders them the main foreseen tool for neoclassical tearing mode mitigation ...
Fusion occurs when light nuclei combine to form heavier nuclei. The energy released in this process powers the stars and can provide humankind with a safe, sustainable, and clean source of baseload electricity, a valuable tool in the fight against climate ...
A key challenge for the development of fusion reactors based on magnetic confinement, such as tokamaks and stellarators, is the control of the turbulent processes. The most prominent feature of turbulence in the Scrape-Off Layer (SOL), the volume between t ...
In 1970, Furth and Yoshikawa (1970 Phys. Fluids 13 2593-6) introduced the scalings of adiabatic plasma compression. Basically, if the shape of the external plasma boundary and the aspect ratio are preserved during the compression, then the density, kinetic ...
The overall performance of fusion devices, such as tokamaks, is strongly correlated to the
phenomena that occur in the boundary region, the outer plasma region that faces the wall of the device. The boundary plays a crucial role in regulating the heat and ...
Nuclear fusion reactor plasmas will need to exhaust a significant proportion of energy flux through radiative processes, to enable acceptable divertor loads. This can be obtained by line radiation from impurities, injected from the plasma edge. There are h ...
The Correlation Electron Cyclotron Emission (CECE) diagnostic at ASDEX Upgrade (AUG) is used to investigate the features of outer core and pedestal (rho(pol) = 0.85-1.0) turbulence across confinement regime transitions. The I-mode confinement regime is a p ...
The perpendicular propagation velocity of turbulent density fluctuations is an important parameter in fusion plasmas, since sheared plasma flows are crucial for reducing turbulence, and thus an essential input parameter for turbulent transport simulations. ...
This thesis presents advancements in the understanding of the plasma conditions leading to the excitation and saturation of the Edge Harmonic Oscillations (EHOs) observed during QH-mode operation in tokamak plasmas. Such operations represent a safer altern ...
The European Roadmap to Fusion Electricity (Federici et al., 2018) [1] details the path to complete within the next three decades the DEMOnstration power plant, DEMO, aiming to a net gain of Energy Q=40. The 2018 DEMO baseline considers a 2 GW tokamak devi ...
Gyrotrons are a class of high-power vacuum-electronics microwave sources, which are envisioned to play an important role in the domain of magnetically confined fusion plasmas. Indeed, only gyrotrons are capable of producing continuous electromagnetic waves ...