Tobias Schuett

University Of York

I completed my undergraduate degree in Physics at the University of Münster during which I spent the final year at the University of York and worked on the detection and analysis of edge localised modes in tokamak plasmas. Being convinced of the importance of fusion research, I am now joining the Fusion CDT to study turbulence in confinement transitions for different divertor configurations. My project will be supervised by Dr Istvan Cziegler (YPI) and by Dr Simon Freethy (CCFE).

After the plasma in a tokamak is heated beyond a critical power threshold, the turbulence located at the edge of the plasma is greatly suppressed and a transition from what is known as low confinement mode (L-mode) into high confinement mode (H-mode) takes place.

While the L-H-transition power threshold dependency on macroscopic plasma parameters such as density and temperature is well understood, the suppression of turbulence also shows to be influenced by different divertor geometries. This coupling is not fully understood and a physical picture is yet missing.

The divertor, which can be thought of as the exhaust of the tokamak, will be subject to especially high heat fluxes in future magnetic confinement fusion devices such as ITER. Different divertor geometries can reduce the heat flux by spreading the magnetic field lines and are hence a promising solution to this problem. I will be conducting research on the MAST-U experimental spherical tokamak that enables the investigation of novel divertor geometries such as ‘Super-X’ and their influence on the turbulence dynamics.