Minimising the presence and size of magnetic islands in the core of stellarators is necessary to retain the advantageous confinement properties of nested flux surfaces. Therefore, efficient optimisation schemes to reduce island size in stellarator configurations are desirable. However, a configuration with small islands may not be good enough: it may be sensitive to the exact positions of the...
Direct numerical solution of the nonlinear Boltzmann transport equation remains elusive nearly 150 years after its discovery. Appropriate approximations continue to serve as the foundation of aerodynamics and plasma physics. However, some important problems in fusion don’t lend themselves to such approximations, such as runaway electron avalanche and regimes of dense neutral populations in...
