Controlling Fusion Plasmas: Turbulent Transport Center for Gyrokinetic Particle Simulations of Turbulent Transport in Burning Plasmas (GPS-TTBP) Developing gyrokinetic particle simulation codes to carry out simulations of turbulent transport in burning plasmas, such as ITER Pat Diamond (project webpage) University of California, San Diego

The goal of this project is to develop the GTC (Gyrokinetic Toroidal Code) Framework and apply it to problems related to the physics of turbulence and turbulent transport in tokamaks, especially ITER. The project involves physics studies, code development, noise effect mitigation, supporting computer science efforts, diagnostics and advanced visualizations, verification and validation. The principal science themes are mesoscale dynamics and non-locality effects on transport, the physics of secondary structures such as zonal flows, and strongly coherent wave-particle interaction phenomena at magnetic precession resonances. Special emphasis is placed on the implications of these themes for rho-star and current scalings and for the turbulent transport of momentum. Research will also explore applications to electron thermal transport, particle transport; ITB formation and cross-cuts such as edge-core coupling, interacation of energetic particles with turbulence and neoclassical tearing mode trigger dynamics. A major thrust of this project is to tackle the problem of noise due to growing weights in delta-f simulations. Verification will be pursued by linear stability study comparisons with the FULL and HD7 codes and by benchmarking with the GKV, GYSELA and other gyrokinetic simulation codes. Validation of gyrokinetic models of ion and electron thermal transport will be pursued by systemic stressing comparisons with fluctuation and transport data from the DIII-D and NSTX tokamaks. A synthetic Beam Emission Spectroscopy diagnostic will be used as part of the valication program.

Science Application: Fusion Science

Project Title: Center for Gyrokinetic Particle Simulations of Turbulent Transport in Burning Plasmas (GPS-TTBP)

Principal Investigator: Pat Diamond
Affiliation: University of California, San Diego

Project Webpage: http://cass.ucsd.edu/groups/plasma/gps-ttbp/

Participating Institutions and Co-Investigators:
University of California, San Diego - Pat Diamond (PI)
Columbia University - Mark Adams
Oak Ridge National Laboratory - Scott Klasky
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory - Taik-Soo Hahm, Wei-li Lee, Gregory Rewoldt, Stephane Ethier, Weixing Wang
University of California, Davis - Kwan-Liu Ma
University of California, Irvine - Zhihong Lin, Liu Chan, Yong Xiao, Ihor Holod, Wenlu Zhang
University of California, Los Angeles - Viktor Decyk
University of Southern California - Mary Hall
University of Texas - Wendell Horton, Frank Waelbroeck

Funding Partners: Office of Science — Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research and Office of Fusion Energy Sciences

Budget and Duration: Approximately $0.75 million per year for three years ¹

Other SciDAC fusion efforts