News

PhD dissertation of Allah Rakha on Alfvénic instabilities

Allah Rakha on his PhD defence.

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).

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Amazing Experience at IPP Summer University for Plasma Physics and Fusion Research

Yet another year, the Max Plank Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) has hosted a Summer University at the heart of their facilities at Garching, near the German city of Munich. From 16 to 20 September, the course has covered the main aspects of plasma physics with emphasis on nuclear fusion, both theoretical and experimental results, and also boarding the subjects of energy production and the energetic challenges the close future holds.

One of our group members, Jordi Manyer, has had the privilege and pleasure to attend the summer school, taking place this week, and soak the knowledge some of the top researchers in IPP have to offer.

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Experience of a summer intern at our group


Since the 25 of June until the 6 of September I was one of the two students that participated in the International Summer HPC Internship Programme at Fusion group in Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). We were already presented in an earlier post entitled New summer interns at BSC Fusion Group. Among the two of us, I am Adam Teixidó, and in this post I will relate my experience, which I enjoyed.

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Collaborating with CIEMAT and Aalto University on modelling of fast ions in TJ-II stellarator

Sadig Mulas (left) and Joona Kontula (right) at MareNostrum4.

From 22 July to 2 August, we enjoyed the visits of two PhD students, Sadig Mulas and Joona Kontula from CIEMAT and Aalto University, respectively, to our group. Sadig and Joona came to work with us within the collaboration between the three institutions (CIEMAT – Aalto University – BSC) on numerical modelling of fast ions in the TJ-II stellarator. The TJ-II stellarator is an experimental fusion device is located at the CIEMAT headquarters in Madrid, Spain, which uses fast ions injected by neutral beam injection to heat the plasma.

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Experiments in full swing on Joint European Torus

Control room experimental team following attentively the various displays showing measured key quantities in real time during one of the M18-05 experimental discharges carried out last Thursday.

The EUROfusion experimental campaign at the Joint European Torus (JET) located at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), UK is in full swing.

Last week our group leader Mervi Mantsinen and our La Caixa-funded PhD student Dani Gallart visited JET to participate in this campaign. Our focus was in on-site preparation, execution and first analysis of two sessions of the experiment M18-05 “ICRH scenario support in D and T plasmas” for which Mervi is one of the two scientific coordinators. This means that she is in charge of the scientific planning of this experiment and the coordination of its international team of approximately 45 scientists from various institutions all over Europe.

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