Plasma simulation

The complexity of fusion-grade plasmas and the increased computational power that has become available in recent years has made the simulation of plasmas a prime object of study in the field of fusion research. Although the basic equations governing the behaviour of magnetised plasmas are known, approximations are always necessary in any code of practical interest; e.g. the extreme disparity of the transport timescales (seconds) and turbulent timescales (microseconds) make it hard to perform detailed turbulence simulations for the whole three-dimensional plasma volume and for several transport timescales.

Codes

Codes can either be interpretative (taking some input from experiment) or predictive. Recent years have seen an increased effort in the field of code benchmarking.

Gyrokinetic codes

• EUTERPE
• SUMMIT/PG3EQ_NC