Position: PhD student

Supervisor: Bogdan Hnat

Project title:

Quantifying, modelling and interpreting edge plasma turbulence in tokamak and stellarator fusion experiments

Funding: EPSRC

Project Description:

The heat and particle fluxes toward the material wall in an operating tokamak are often bursty and intermittent. Plasma edge turbulence is one of the ingredients of this complex behaviour. Understanding this process, its development and evolution under different operating regimes, is critical for designing of the future fusion reactors. It has been suggested, for example, that the higher confinement mode of the tokamak operation results from the suppression of edge turbulence. Experimental evidence suggests that statistical properties of edge plasmas are universal and scale invariant. The project explores characterisation of edge plasma fluctuations using statistical measures such as scaling exponents and probability density function invariance. The aim of the project is to develop a stochastic model for fluctuations in the observed edge plasma parameters.

Publications:

• J R Robinson, B Hnat, P Dura, A Kirk, P Tamain and the MAST Team, Interaction between a low-frequency electrostatic mode and resonant magnetic perturbations in MAST, Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion 54 105007
  
• P. D. Dura, B. Hnat, J. Robinson, and R. O. Dendy, Vorticity scaling and intermittency in drift-interchange plasma turbulence, Phys. Plasmas 19, 092301 (2012)
• J. L. A. Fordham, H. Kawakami, R. M. Michel, R. Much and J. R. Robinson , High time-resolution spectroscopic imaging using intensified CCD detectors Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 319, 414-418 (2000)

Background:

After a pre-University year at IBM writing some multi-threaded network tools in C, I completed my Physics BSc from UCL. I then worked in general IT support for a while before briefly returning to UCL to work on improving the photocathode sensitivity in a microchannel plate intensified CCD camera. Following this I moved to an independent TV/Film Post Production company looking after high end SGI/Irix and Linux based Autodesk visual effects systems such as Flame and Maya, and the associated render farm, 10Gb network and SAN storage infrastructure. In returning to science, I have just completed an MSc in the Physics and Technology of Nuclear Reactors at the University of Birmingham.

Contact Details

Centre for Fusion, Space & Astrophysics
Department of Physics
University of Warwick
Coventry
CV4 7AL
United Kingdom

telephone:
+44(0)2476 150946

fax:
+44 (0) 24 76150897

email:
james.robinson@warwick.ac.uk

office:
PS103