National Center for Computational Sciences

ORNL-led team featured in leading plasma publication

Fusion simulations performed on ORNL’s Cray XT4 Jaguar supercomputer are featured in the cover article of July’s edition of the journal Physics of Plasmas, published by the American Institute of Physics.

A team led by ORNL physicist Fred Jaeger used its AORSA code to demonstrate that radio waves will be effective in heating the multinational ITER fusion reactor. The team’s article is entitled “Simulation of high-power electromagnetic wave heating in the ITER burning plasma,” and the magazine’s cover features an image created by NCCS visualization specialist Sean Ahern.

The ITER reactor will use antennas to launch radio waves carrying 20 megawatts of power into the fusion plasma, an ionized gas containing deuterium and tritium. The waves will both heat the plasma—which must reach a temperature about ten times hotter than the center of the sun—and create a current that controls it. The team’s simulations will help the reactor’s designers configure the antennas to make the most of that power in both these areas.

The team is part of a Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) project known as the SciDAC Center for Simulation of Wave-Plasma Interactions. Its AORSA code has been especially effective at making use of Jaguar’s enormous computing power, reaching 154 trillion calculations a second.