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Abstract
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After half a century of intense pursuit, fusion remains an elusive goal as an attractive solution for the world’s increasingly critical energy problem. The key obstacle for reaching the ignition has been the lack of fundamental understanding, and thus the limited ability of controlling the complex, nonlinear, and dynamical system characteristic of high temperature plasmas in fusion experiments. Renewed optimism in magnetic confinement has come from recent progress marked by the strong coupling between experiment, theory, and simulation. In particular, large-scale simulations enabled by the ever increasing power of modern computers are rapidly advancing the fusion energy science.
Confinement and stability properties of fusion plasmas depend on cross-scale interaction of multiple physical processes of microturbulence, energetic particle instabilities, and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) modes. I will discuss the development of the integrated particle simulation of these kinetic-MHD processes critical to ITER fusion experiments. Such large scale fusion simulation requires interdisciplinary collaborations involving plasma physicists and computational scientists. I will also highlight recent progress in the verification and validation of the simulation model and in the studies of nonlinear wave-particle interactions underlying the transport processes in collisionless plasmas.
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