Global gyrokinetic simulations of tokamak turbulence

Abstract

The understanding of turbulence in magnetically confined plasmas plays a crucial role on the road to the demonstration of the use of nuclear fusion as a virtually inexhaustible, environmentally benign source of energy anomalous transport of heat, particles and momentum. The unique blend of Monte Carlo Particle-In-Cell and Finite Element techniques used in the ORB5 code, together with advanced noise reduction schemes, makes it a unique tool for such studies. Recent improvements to the code, both on the numerical side with close to ideal scalability demonstrated up to 32k cores, and on the physics side with the inclusion of non-adiabatic electron response, electromagnetic perturbations, collisions and source terms, opens the possibility to simulate larger system sizes and more complete physics with a better accuracy.