We are delighted to announce that our group member Allah Rakha has been granted with the title of PhD in physics after successfully defending his dissertation entitled “Analysis of energetic particle-driven Alfvénic instabilities in tokamak and stellarator plasmas using three dimensional numerical tools”.
The evaluation board was composed by five members from five universities and research centers, i.e. EPFL (Switzerland), Ghent University (Belgium), Universidad de Sevilla (Spain), UC3M (Spain) and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC, Spain), to meet the requirement of his co-tutelle PhD programme at Ghent University and UPC. The defence itself took place on September 27, 2019 at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona (Spain).
Throughout his PhD research period of three years and a half, Allah Rakha has made many scientific contributions. Here we mention his two first-author articles in the journal Nuclear Fusion, the first ranked journal in the field of fusion according the the Journal Citation Reports. One of the papers is “Modelling of beam-driven Alfvén modes in TJ-II plasmas”, modelling results aimed at understanding a certain type of energetic-particle-driven instabilities called Alfvén modes in TJ-II stellarator plasmas and their comparisons with experimental results. The other one is entitled “Shear Alfvén wave continuum spectrum with bifurcated helical core equilibria” and describes the first modelling results aimed at understanding Alfvén eigenmodes (BAEs) observed during monster sawtooth crashes in ASDEX Upgrade tokamak plasmas.
Allah Rakha’s PhD thesis was graded Excellent by the members of the panel who highlighted his contributions to the research field and the efforts done through these years. The Fusion group celebrates his success. Congratulations Dr. Allah Rakha!