Thermonuclear fusion is studied as an alternative for long term energy production. Magnetic confinement is a promising method to achieve fusion by trapping the plasma into a magnetically confined region and heating it to fusion relevant energy levels, such is a tokamak. Scrape-off layer (SOL) turbulence is a form of particle and energy transport on the outermost layer of the confined region, driven by interchange dynamics, resulting in the intermittent birth of filaments (also known as blobs). Filaments contribute significantly to the heat load of plasma facing components.

The student will use existing runs of the HESEL SOL turbulence code to generate synthetic measurement signals via the RENATE synthetic beam emission spectroscopy (BES) diagnostic. The student will perform a statistical analysis of the synthetic BES signals and compare it to the corresponding measured BES signals. The analysis will focus on waiting time, amplitude, size and velocity distributions of the filaments. Multiple plasma configurations will be analyzed with the aim to observe the evolution of before mentioned distribution functions as function of plasma density and magnetic field configurations. The work will be carried out using data from the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak.