Dr Richard Nies has been awarded the Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award by the American Physical Society. The award, presented by the American Physical Society's Division of Plasma Physics, recognises the most outstanding doctoral thesis in plasma physics each year.
Dr Nies’ thesis, ‘Turbulence and flows in toroidal fusion plasmas’, studies the turbulence and flows that govern the performance of fusion devices. Turbulence is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature, helping mix the milk in our morning coffee for instance. However, when this turbulent mixing occurs in fusion devices, it allows heat to escape, making the extremely high temperatures needed for nuclear fusion difficult to sustain. Understanding this turbulence, and finding ways to control it, is therefore essential to the development of fusion energy.
‘The two main candidate designs for fusion reactors are doughnut-shaped: the tokamak, a simple symmetric doughnut, and the stellarator, a three-dimensional 'twisty' one,' commented Dr Nies. 'My research has revealed unexpected ways in which the geometry of these devices affects plasma flows, which are of particular interest as they tear apart turbulent eddies, improving the energy confinement. The curvature of the doughnut, for example, causes the flows generated by the turbulence itself to travel across the plasma. These travelling flows turn out to be central in determining the saturation level of the turbulence, and therefore how much heat is carried away by it.’
Dr Nies is currently a Leverhulme-Peierls Fellow in the Department of Physics. He is the second Leverhulme-Peierls Fellow in the Department of Physics to receive international recognition for his doctoral research within a year, following Dr Pablo Bilbao, who was awarded the European Physical Society Plasma Physics Division's PhD Research Award last March. Together, the two awards are a testament to the strength of the Leverhulme-Peierls Fellowship programme run by the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics.