Fast and furious of fusion plasmas

Thermonuclear fusion provides a possibility to generate energy without greenhouse gas emissions, major safety issues or problems of running out of fuel. Unfortunately, taming the fusion energy production process has turned out the be more challenging than was originally predicted. However, development has reached a phase where the fusion community is building a tokamak reactor with the goal of proving the scientific feasibility of thermonuclear fusion. This machine comes with many new physics phenomena such as fusion burn, which is a self-heating process of the fusion fuel by the fusion reactions themselves. The high energy particles (alphas and neutrons) born in the fusion reactions pose a risk for the reactor materials. This risk needs to be understood and controlled and numerical simulations prove invaluable in this perspective. This project aims to develop numerical methods to identify and solve the problems of these fast and furios high energy particles of fusion plasmas.