Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) ran cutting-edge simulations over a time span of two years, which has assisted physicists in better understanding what manipulates the behavior of the plasma turbulence, driven by severe heat, essential for the creation of fusion energy.

The research team has come up with some exciting answers to long-standing queries regarding plasma heat loss that has earlier thwarted efforts of predicting the performance of fusion reactors. Further research on the subject could make way for the alternative source of energy.

Fusion is possible only when a sufficiently high temperature and density is maintained to let the atoms in the reactor to deal with their mutual repulsion and come together for helium formation.

However, turbulence is among the side-effects of this process. It can boost the rate of plasma heat loss, notable restricting the resulting energy output. Thus researchers have been putting in efforts to highlight both the causes the turbulence and how it can be managed or probably eliminated.

The designing and building of fusion reactors are very complex and costly, thus supercomputers have been in use for over four decades to simulate the conditions for the creation of better reactor designs. The Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility NERSC has backed fusion research since 1974.

A barrier in the fusion hunt so far is that computer models have mostly failed in predicting exactly how turbulence is going to behave within the reactor. Moreover, in fusion experiments there have long been variations between predictions and experimental results, while studying the contribution of turbulence in heat loss in the confined plasma.

Now MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center researchers along with colleagues at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and General Atomics have come up with a solution to this difference.

The team performed high-resolution multi-scale simulations, and succeeded in simultaneously resolving multiple turbulence instabilities that have been treated in separate simulations earlier.