Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure?: NoOffer Description
Context: Controlling heat and particle fluxes on tokamak walls is a critical challenge for future tokamaks. Achieving burning plasmas near ignition while ensuring sufficient power distribution on divertor components requires precise operational constraints. This necessitates the development of optimized scenarios, capable of managing heat flow from the thermonuclear core to the divertor. Reliable numerical simulations with advanced capabilities are essential to predict turbulent transport and plasma-wall interactions in realistic geometries.
Objective: A 2-year postdoctoral position (renewable) is available at the M2P2 Laboratory (Marseille), in collaboration with the Fusion Modeling Research Group at CEA Cadarache. The successful candidate will contribute to the operation and development of SOLEDGE-HDG, a cutting-edge Hybridizable Discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) code (Giorgiani et al., JCP 2018). This code enables high-fidelity simulations of plasma transport under realistic tokamak conditions.
Innovation: Unlike most existing fusion codes, SOLEDGE-HDG employs a high-order numerical scheme, allowing the use of meshes independent of magnetic field lines or flux surfaces. This flexibility enables simulations of heat exhaust physics in non-steady magnetic configurations, a groundbreaking capability in plasma transport modeling. Such conditions are critical in various plasma scenarios, including:
- Plasma breakdown
- Current ramp-up (transition from limiter to divertor configuration)
- Flat-top operation (e.g., divertor strike point sweeping, MHD relaxation events like sawteeth)
Additionally, the solver’s compatibility with unstructured meshes ensures accurate discretization of any realistic tokamak chamber.
Responsibilities: The candidate will:
- Optimize and enhance the HDG code (e.g., implementation of Asymptotic-Preserving (AP) schemes, module coupling, reduced model integration, …).
- Perform advanced simulations for next-generation tokamaks (e.g., ITER, SPARC, …), in close collaboration with experimental analyses, particularly on WEST (west.cea.fr) for code validation.
- Work in a multidisciplinary environment, bridging applied mathematics, numerical methods, and plasma physics.
Where to apply
E-mail: ERIC.SERRE@UNIV-AMU.FR
Requirements
Research Field: Physics » Computational physics
Education Level: PhD or equivalent
Skills/Qualifications
- PhD in Applied Mathematics, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Plasma physics with a numerical modelling activity.
- Demonstrated expertise in finite-element methods or related numerical techniques.
- Experience in code development, HPC architectures, and parallel programming is highly desirable.
Languages: ENGLISH
Level: Good
Work Location(s)
Number of offers available: 1
Company/Institute: M2P2
Country: France
City: MARSEILLE
Postal Code: 13013
Street: 38 RUE FRÉDÉRIC JOLIOT CURIE
Contact
City: MARSEILLE
Website: https://www.m2p2.fr/
Street: 38 RUE FRÉDÉRIC JOLIOT CURIE
Postal Code: 13013
E-Mail: ERIC.SERRE@UNIV-AMU.FR
