My PhD project is centered around synthetic diagnostics for magnetic confinement fusion at the MAST-U experiment. I am working on implementing synthetic diagnostics for soft x-rays emitted from plasma where fast ions interact with magnetohydrodynamic instabilities. The aim of this research is to understand the behaviour of fast ions in fusion plasmas. These fast ions carry much of the energy of the plasma and as such need to be contained in the plasmas.
Synthetic diagnostics and a feasibility study will also be done on an imaging neutral particle analyzer. This analyzer looks at charge exchange reactions involving bulk and fast ions and provides information on the fast ion population and its confinement.