Diego del-Castillo-Negrete (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

"Dynamics and transport of high energy particles is tokamak plasmas"

Abstract: Magnetic disruptions and burning plasmas are two critical problems of the fusion program involving high energy particles. In the case of disruptions, relativistic runaway electrons (RE) can seriously damage the plasma facing components. On the other hand, to sustain a burning plasma, energetic particles (EP), generated via external heating as well as fusion-born alpha particles, need to be confined to transfer their energy to the thermal population. In this presentation we discuss recent progress in RE and EP. In the case of RE, topics include modeling and simulation of generation, mitigation, and assessment of wall damage. In the case of EP topics include the confinement and anomalous transport of ions and alpha particles in the presence of EGAMS, tearing modes, fishbones, and Alfven modes. To address these problems two codes have been developed: KORC (Kinetic Orbit Runaway electron Code) and TAPaS (Toroidal Accelerated Particle Simulator). A brief description of these codes will be presented along with a discussion of novel theoretical tools including Feynman-Kac based probabilistic methods and normalizing flow machine learning algorithms.