Undergrad Education / Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) / Ar pumpout by ICRF waves in C-Mod L- and I-mode plasmas
In future fusion reactors, impurity accumulation, particularly from heavy ions such as tungsten, is a concern due to how efficiently impurities cool the plasmas. Our group is working to characterize the transport mechanism causing the observed reduction in impurity density and then leveraging this mechanism to control tungsten accumulation in the SPARC tokamak. We’re exploring various computational and experimental approaches, but one aspect that would be helpful to have a UROP for would be to calculate the ion energy distribution functions caused by the ICRF interaction with the argon ions. Conor has two codes almost entirely prepared to do such a calculation: one via a Monte Carlo sampling of how the ion orbits change in time using the ASCOT4-RFOF code; another is a continuum approach solving the Vlasov-Maxwell system of equations using the AORSA code coupled to the CQL3D code. A student must finish preparing these codes to be used and then analyze various C-Mod shots. The intent is to cross-validate the energy distribution functions from these two methods and then cross-validate the inferred transport from experimental methods already underway.
Preferred Experience: Good coding practices, Github, basic electrodynamics, basic statistical mechanics, experience coding in python, Matlab, Fortran.
Figure: Observed spectroscopic signal from argon charge states (bottom two panels, red & purple lines) when the Ion Cyclotron Range of Frequencies (ICRF) heating is energized (2nd panel, black line) in plasmas with substantial hydrogen-to-deuterium re
Head to MIT's UROP site to apply for this opportunity.