Resonant mode-particle interaction priors for energetic particle phase-space tomography
Name of applicant
Mads Rud Larsen
Title
Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Amount
DKK 450,000
Year
2024
Type of grant
Internationalisation Fellowships
What?
This project aims to enhance our ability to measure the distribution of energetic particles in the plasma in fusion reactors and how they interact with electromagnetic waves. The distribution cannot be measured directly but must be inferred by tomography using noisy measurements. The project will develop methods to mitigate the noise and guide the tomography towards the correct result.
Why?
Energetic particles are born from fusion reactions, and they are needed in the plasma to sustain the high temperatures. However, they can also drive waves in the plasma unstable, which can lead to plasma damaging the reactor walls and decrease energy production. A thorough understanding of the wave-particle interactions is therefore necessary.
How?
As the tomographic problem has many possible solutions, we must be clever to choose the best one. To obtain the optimal solution and ensure that measurement noise does not dominate the result, we will incorporate a mathematical term in the tomography that penalizes those solutions that do not obey the physics of wave-particle interactions.