GRANUL (Phase-space GRANULation in fusion plasmas)

Thermonuclear fusion is an ideal solution to the energy crisis: a clean, safe, global, abundant and sustainable source of energy. A promising approach is to heat an ionized gas (a plasma) of hydrogen isotopes at 150 million degrees, and confine it in a donut-shaped magnetic field. After decades of progress, this is routinely done in several devices (tokamaks and stellerators) around the world, albeit not efficiently enough, yet. The project objective is to uncover the role of fine-scale structures in both real-space AND velocity-space, in turbulent fusion plasmas.
The competition between these structures and turbulence is predicted to result in coagulation, or granulation, of the phase space. We rely on a reduced model that isolates a certain type of low-dimensional turbulence as a prototype for other turbulences.