ENVIRONMENT AND ENERGY

In nuclear fusion experiments, researchers routinely heat hot gases up to temperatures of 100 million degrees in order to create the conditions needed for energy-producing fusion reactions. Turbulence is one of the main obstacles on the way to sustaining these conditions reliably. A particular challenge is found in the plasma edge, where turbulence is suppressed by a self-organized transport barrier. Researchers from the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics have made important progress to understanding the turbulence in this region, leveraging resources provided by the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing.