Simulating plasma physics on quantum computers is difficult because most problems of interest are nonlinear, but quantum computers are not naturally suitable for nonlinear operations. In weakly nonlinear regimes, plasma problems can be modelled as wave–wave interactions. In this paper, we develop a quantization approach to convert nonlinear wave–wave interaction problems to Hamiltonian simulation problems. We demonstrate our approach using two qubits on a superconducting device. Unlike a photonic device, a superconducting device does not naturally have the desired interactions in its native Hamiltonian. Nevertheless, Hamiltonian simulations can still be performed by decomposing required unitary operations into native gates. To improve experimental results, we employ a range of error-mitigation techniques. Apart from readout error mitigation, we use randomized compilation to transform undiagnosed coherent errors into well-behaved stochastic Pauli channels. Moreover, to compensate for stochastic noise, we rescale exponentially decaying probability amplitudes using rates measured from cycle benchmarking. We carefully consider how different choices of product-formula algorithms affect the overall error and show how a trade-off can be made to best utilize limited quantum resources. This study provides an example of how plasma problems may be solved on near-term quantum computing platforms.

Free normal-flow (NF) conditions at the plasma boundary are shown to be essential for three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations to agree with linear stability theory. A comparative verification study is presented between two different formulations of the boundary conditions (BCs) for velocity perturbations: (i) fully consistent free NF implementation and (ii) fixed NF formulation, neglecting flow perturbations at the numerical boundary. Numerical results are compared with consolidated figures of merit from the linear theory of external kink modes. We consider two classes of initial equilibria presenting different numerical challenges: a uniform current channel surrounded by pure vacuum and a shaped Wesson-like equilibrium, with smooth (polynomial) radial dependency. Only the fully consistent free NF formulation is invariably accurate in modelling the plasma interface at the numerical boundary, without the need of enforcing a pseudovacuum region at the edge of the simulation domain, as in most analogous past studies. This study employs the cylindrical code SPECYL (Cappello & Biskamp, Nucl. Fusion, vol. 36, no. 5, 1996, p. 571) that solves a full-MHD model without pressure gradients, whose fully consistent resistive wall module with free NF BCs was recently successfully verified against the independent code PIXIE3D (Spinicci et al., AIP Adv., vol. 13, no. 9, 2023, p. 095111).

We derive an advanced surrogate model for predicting turbulent transport at the edge of tokamaks driven by electron temperature gradient (ETG) modes. Our derivation is based on a recently developed sensitivity-driven sparse grid interpolation approach for uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis at scale, which informs the set of parameters that define the surrogate model as a scaling law. Our model reveals that ETG-driven electron heat flux is influenced by the safety factor $q$, electron beta $\beta _e$ and normalized electron Debye length $\lambda _D$, in addition to well-established parameters such as the electron temperature and density gradients. To assess the trustworthiness of our model's predictions beyond training, we compute prediction intervals using bootstrapping. The surrogate model's predictive power is tested across a wide range of parameter values, including within-distribution testing parameters (to verify our model) as well as out-of-bounds and out-of-distribution testing (to validate the proposed model). Overall, validation efforts show that our model competes well with, or can even outperform, existing scaling laws in predicting ETG-driven transport.

This study investigates the dynamics of various particles within the plasma sheath, focusing on the influence of secondary emissions from charged dust particles. The research concentrates on backscattered electron emission (BEE), inelastic reflection emission (IRE) and true-secondary electron emission (TEE) as key contributors to the behaviour of dust particles within the plasma sheath. Employing the semi-empirical model of Furman and Pivi (F-P model), the study defines the total emission of secondary electrons (EES), comprising these three types. The analysis aims to enhance our understanding of the complex interplay between secondary emission phenomena and the dynamics of charged particles within the plasma sheath, contributing valuable insights to the field. Furthermore, a comparative study has been conducted between the results obtained from the emission of secondary electrons according to the Sternglass theory and the emission of secondary electrons obtained using the F-P model. It is observed that the secondary electron emission (SEE) from the dust, based on the F-P model, demonstrates more pronounced effects on the sheath characteristics, particularly when considering lower values of the superextensive electron parameter ‘$q$’.

In this work we consider the problem of optimizing a stellarator subject to hard constraints on the design variables and physics properties of the equilibrium. We survey current numerical methods for handling these constraints, and summarize a number of methods from the wider optimization community that have not been used extensively for stellarator optimization thus far. We demonstrate the utility of new methods of constrained optimization by optimizing a quasi-axisymmetric stellarator for favourable physics properties while preventing strong shaping of the plasma boundary, which can be difficult to create with external current sources.

We introduce an extension of the particle-in-cell method that captures the Landau collisional effects in the Vlasov–Maxwell–Landau equations. The method arises from a regularisation of the variational formulation of the Landau equation, leading to a discretisation of the collision operator that conserves mass, charge, momentum and energy, while increasing the (regularised) entropy. The collisional effects appear as a fully deterministic effective force, thus the method does not require any transport–collision splitting. The scheme can be used in arbitrary dimension, and for a general interaction, including the Coulomb case. We validate the scheme on scenarios such as the Landau damping, the two-stream instability and the Weibel instability, demonstrating its effectiveness in the numerical simulation of plasma.

Electrostatic gyrokinetic instabilities and turbulence in the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator are studied. Particular attention is paid to the ion-temperature-gradient (ITG) instability and its character close to marginal stability [Floquet-type turbulence (Zocco et al., Phys. Rev. E, vol. 106, 2022, p. L013202) with no electron temperature gradient]. The flux tube version of the $\delta f$ code stella (Barnes et al., J. Comput. Phys., vol. 391, 2019, pp. 365–380) is used to run linear and nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations with kinetic electrons. The nature of the dominant instability depends on the wavelength perpendicular to the magnetic field, and the results are conveniently displayed in stability diagrams that take this dependence into account. This approach highlights the presence of universal instabilities, which are less unstable but have longer wavelengths than other modes. A quasi-linear estimate of the heat flux suggests they are relevant for transport. Close to the stability threshold, the linear eigenmodes and turbulence form highly extended structures along the computational domain if the magnetic shear is small. Numerical experiments and diagnostics are undertaken to assess the resulting radial localisation of the turbulence, which affects the interaction of the latter with zonal flows. Increasing the amplitude of the magnetic shear (e.g.through current drive) has a stabilising effect on the turbulence and, thus, reduces the nonlinear energy transport.

In the present work, we extend the results of a previous investigation on the dynamics of electrons under the action of an inverse free-electron-laser scheme (Almansa et al., Phys. Plasmas, vol. 26, 2019, 033105). While the former work examined electrons as single test particles subject to the combined action of a modulated wiggler plus a laser field, we now look at electrons as composing a particle beam, where collective space-charge effects are relevant and included in the analysis. Our previous work showed that effective acceleration is achieved when the initial velocities of the particles are close enough to the phase velocity of the beat-wave mode formed by the laser and the wiggler fields. Electrons are then initially accelerated by a ponderomotive uphill effect generated by the beat mode and, once reaching the phase velocity of the beat, undergo a final strong resonant acceleration step resembling a catapult effect. The present work shows that, under proper conditions, space-charge effects play a similar role as the initial (or injected) velocity of the beam. Even if acceleration is absent when space charge is neglected, it may be present and effective when charge effects are taken into account. We also discuss how far the space charge can grow without affecting the sustainability of the acceleration process.

During a space mission, switching to an electric propulsion system from chemical propulsion, once the spacecraft is out of the Earth's gravity, significantly reduces the mission's overall cost. In electric propulsion, the Hall thruster and gridded ion thruster are established technologies. These thrusters compromise mission longevity due to continuous erosion of the device electrode material. To overcome this issue, an electrode less expanding magnetic field plasma thruster or helicon plasma thruster (HPT), was proposed and research is on going worldwide. The HPT shows scaling of thrust with input power while Hall thrusters and ion thrusters do not. Typically, an inert xenon gas is used as a fuel in HPT devices due to a low ionization potential and non-hazardous nature. Xenon is not easily available in nature and during a space mission it needs to be stored in high pressure tanks. Recently, iodine has been proposed as an alternate to xenon as it is easily available and does not have any storage issues. In most of the numerical simulations, argon is used as a fuel gas to reduce the simulation cost. Using a 1D3V particle-in-cell Monte Carlo collision code, we present here a net thrust generation for different fuel gases such as argon, xenon and iodine. We compare plasma flow rates and directed ion beam velocity for different fuel gases having identical inputs. Thrust and plasma flow are investigated for different magnetic field gradients in the plasma expansion region for unidirectional and bidirectional HPT and is reported here. Using iodine fuel, a significant increase in net thrust is obtained for higher magnetic field divergence for identical simulation input parameters while comparing with xenon fueled cases.

Transit-time damping (TTD) is a process in which the magnetic mirror force – induced by the parallel gradient of magnetic field strength – interacts with resonant plasma particles in a time-varying magnetic field, leading to the collisionless damping of electromagnetic waves and the resulting energization of those particles through the perpendicular component of the electric field, $E_\perp$. In this study, we utilize the recently developed field–particle correlation technique to analyse gyrokinetic simulation data. This method enables the identification of the velocity-space structure of the TTD energy transfer rate between waves and particles during the damping of plasma turbulence. Our analysis reveals a unique bipolar pattern of energy transfer in the velocity-space characteristic of TTD. By identifying this pattern, we provide clear evidence of TTD's significant role in the damping of strong plasma turbulence. Additionally, we compare the TTD signature with that of Landau damping (LD). Although they both produce a bipolar pattern of phase-space energy density loss and gain about the parallel resonant velocity of the Alfvénic waves, they are mediated by different forces and exhibit different behaviours as the perpendicular velocity $v_\perp \to 0$. We also explore how the dominant damping mechanism varies with ion plasma beta $\beta _i$, showing that TTD dominates over LD for $\beta _i > 1$. This work deepens our understanding of the role of TTD in the damping of weakly collisional plasma turbulence and paves the way to seek the signature of TTD using in situ spacecraft observations of turbulence in space plasmas.

GX is a code designed to solve the nonlinear gyrokinetic system for low-frequency turbulence in magnetized plasmas, particularly tokamaks and stellarators. In GX, our primary motivation and target is a fast gyrokinetic solver that can be used for fusion reactor design and optimization along with wide-ranging physics exploration. This has led to several code and algorithm design decisions, specifically chosen to prioritize time to solution. First, we have used a discretization algorithm that is pseudospectral in the entire phase space, including a Laguerre–Hermite pseudospectral formulation of velocity space, which allows for smooth interpolation between coarse gyrofluid-like resolutions and finer conventional gyrokinetic resolutions and efficient evaluation of a model collision operator. Additionally, we have built GX to natively target graphics processors (GPUs), which are among the fastest computational platforms available today. Finally, we have taken advantage of the reactor-relevant limit of small $\rho _*$ by using the radially local flux-tube approach. In this paper we present details about the gyrokinetic system and the numerical algorithms used in GX to solve the system. We then present several numerical benchmarks against established gyrokinetic codes in both tokamak and stellarator magnetic geometries to verify that GX correctly simulates gyrokinetic turbulence in the small $\rho _*$ limit. Moreover, we show that the convergence properties of the Laguerre–Hermite spectral velocity formulation are quite favourable for nonlinear problems of interest. Coupled with GPU acceleration, which we also investigate with scaling studies, this enables GX to be able to produce useful turbulence simulations in minutes on one (or a few) GPUs and higher fidelity results in a few hours using several GPUs. GX is open-source software that is ready for fusion reactor design studies.

The Vlasov–Maxwell equations provide an ab initio description of collisionless plasmas, but solving them is often impractical because of the wide range of spatial and temporal scales that must be resolved and the high dimensionality of the problem. In this work, we present a quantum-inspired semi-implicit Vlasov–Maxwell solver that uses the quantized tensor network (QTN) framework. With this QTN solver, the cost of grid-based numerical simulation of size $N$ is reduced from $O(N)$ to $O(\text {poly}(D))$, where $D$ is the ‘rank’ or ‘bond dimension’ of the QTN and is typically set to be much smaller than $N$. We find that for the five-dimensional test problems considered here, a modest $D=64$ appears to be sufficient for capturing the expected physics despite the simulations using a total of $N=2^{36}$ grid points, which would require $D=2^{18}$ for full-rank calculations. Additionally, we observe that a QTN time evolution scheme based on the Dirac–Frenkel variational principle allows one to use somewhat larger time steps than prescribed by the Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy constraint. As such, this work demonstrates that the QTN format is a promising means of approximately solving the Vlasov–Maxwell equations with significantly reduced cost.

We propose an algorithm for encoding linear kinetic plasma problems in quantum circuits. The focus is on modelling electrostatic linear waves in a one-dimensional Maxwellian electron plasma. The waves are described by the linearized Vlasov–Ampère system with a spatially localized external current that drives plasma oscillations. This system is formulated as a boundary-value problem and cast in the form of a linear vector equation $\boldsymbol {A}{\boldsymbol{\psi} } = \boldsymbol {b}$ to be solved by using the quantum signal processing algorithm. The latter requires encoding of matrix $\boldsymbol {A}$ in a quantum circuit as a sub-block of a unitary matrix. We propose how to encode $\boldsymbol {A}$ in a circuit in a compressed form and discuss how the resulting circuit scales with the problem size and the desired precision.

When simulating runaway electron dynamics in tokamak disruptions, fluid models with lower numerical cost are often preferred to more accurate kinetic models. The aim of this work is to compare fluid and kinetic simulations of a large variety of different disruption scenarios in ITER. We consider both non-activated and activated scenarios; for the latter, we derive and implement kinetic sources for the Compton scattering and tritium beta decay runaway electron generation mechanisms in our simulation tool Dream (Hoppe et al., Comput. Phys. Commun., vol. 268, 2021, 108098). To achieve a diverse set of disruption scenarios, Bayesian optimization is used to explore a range of massive material injection densities for deuterium and neon. The cost function is designed to distinguish between successful and unsuccessful disruption mitigation based on the runaway current, current quench time and transported fraction of the heat loss. In the non-activated scenarios, we find that fluid and kinetic disruption simulations can have significantly different runaway electron dynamics, due to an overestimation of the runaway seed by the fluid model. The primary cause of this is that the fluid hot-tail generation model neglects superthermal electron transport losses during the thermal quench. In the activated scenarios, the fluid and kinetic models give similar predictions, which can be explained by the significant influence of the activated sources on the runaway dynamics and the seed.

Collisions are an important dissipation mechanism in plasmas. When approximating collision operators numerically, it is important to preserve their mathematical structure in order to retain the laws of thermodynamics at the discrete level. This is particularly challenging when considering particle methods. A simple but commonly used collision operator is the Lenard–Bernstein operator, or its modified energy- and momentum-conserving counterpart. In this work, we present a macro-particle discretisation of this operator that is provably energy and momentum preserving.

Isothermal fluid turbulence simulations have been performed in the edge and scrape-off layer (SOL) of an analytic stellarator configuration with an island divertor, thereby providing numerical insight into edge turbulence in regions around islands in a stellarator. The steady-state transport follows the a curvature drive that is inverse to the major radius ($1/R$) toward the outboard side, but large fluctuations are present throughout the island divertor region, with the average wavelength of similar size to the island width. The system exhibits a prominent $m=2$, $n=5$ mode, where m is the poloidal mode number and n is the toroidal mode number, although other modes are present. The amplitude and radial extent of the density fluctuations are similar throughout the edge and SOL, but can decrease near island O-points. The fluctuations exhibit a predominantly positive skewness on the outboard midplane, indicating blob-like perturbations for the transport into the outer SOL. It is determined that a point on the separatrix is generally more correlated with regions outside of the SOL than a nearby reference point which does not lie on the separatrix.

Magnetic reconnection is an important process in astrophysical environments, as it reconfigures magnetic field topology and converts magnetic energy into thermal and kinetic energy. In extreme astrophysical systems, such as black hole coronae and pulsar magnetospheres, radiative cooling modifies the energy partition by radiating away internal energy, which can lead to the radiative collapse of the reconnection layer. In this paper, we perform two- and three-dimensional simulations to model the MARZ (Magnetic Reconnection on Z) experiments, which are designed to access cooling rates in the laboratory necessary to investigate reconnection in a previously unexplored radiatively cooled regime. These simulations are performed in GORGON, an Eulerian two-temperature resistive magnetohydrodynamic code, which models the experimental geometry comprising two exploding wire arrays driven by 20 MA of current on the Z machine (Sandia National Laboratories). Radiative losses are implemented using non-local thermodynamic equilibrium tables computed using the atomic code Spk, and we probe the effects of radiation transport by implementing both a local radiation loss model and $P_{1/3}$ multi-group radiation transport. The load produces highly collisional, super-Alfvénic (Alfvén Mach number $M_A \approx 1.5$), supersonic (Sonic Mach number $M_S \approx 4-5$) strongly driven plasma flows which generate an elongated reconnection layer (Aspect Ratio $L/\delta \approx 100$, Lundquist number $S_L \approx 400$). The reconnection layer undergoes radiative collapse when the radiative losses exceed the rates of ohmic and compressional heating (cooling rate/hydrodynamic transit rate = $\tau _{\text {cool}}^{-1}/\tau _{H}^{-1}\approx 100$); this generates a cold strongly compressed current sheet, leading to an accelerated reconnection rate, consistent with theoretical predictions. Finally, the current sheet is also unstable to the plasmoid instability, but the magnetic islands are extinguished by strong radiative cooling before ejection from the layer.

We present the results of numerical simulation by two-dimensional hybrid particle-in-cell code of high-beta plasma with hot ions in an axisymmetric mirror machine. Two particular effects are discussed: the self-rotating of plasma with Maxwellian ions in regime of diamagnetic confinement and the excitation of axisymmetric magnetosonic waves in a high-beta plasma with sloshing ions.

We present new stellarator equilibria that have been optimized for reduced turbulent transport using nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations within the optimization loop. The optimization routine involves coupling the pseudo-spectral GPU-native gyrokinetic code GX with the stellarator equilibrium and optimization code DESC. Since using GX allows for fast nonlinear simulations, we directly optimize for reduced nonlinear heat fluxes. To handle the noisy heat flux traces returned by these simulations, we employ the simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) method that only uses two objective function evaluations for a simple estimate of the gradient. We show several examples that optimize for both reduced heat fluxes and good quasi-symmetry as a proxy for low neoclassical transport. Finally, we run full transport simulations using the T3D stellarator transport code to evaluate the changes in the macroscopic profiles.

Recent developments in the design of magnetic confinement fusion devices have allowed the construction of exceptionally optimized stellarator configurations. The near-axis expansion in particular has been proven to enable the construction of magnetic configurations with good confinement properties while taking only a fraction of the usual computation time to generate optimized magnetic equilibria. However, not much is known about the overall features of fast-particle orbits computed in such analytical, yet simplified, equilibria when compared with those originating from accurate equilibrium solutions. This work aims to assess and demonstrate the potential of the near-axis expansion to provide accurate information on particle orbits and to compute loss fractions in moderate to high aspect ratios. The configurations used here are all scaled to fusion-relevant parameters and approximate quasi-symmetry to various degrees. This allows us to understand how deviations from quasi-symmetry affect particle orbits and what are their effects on the estimation of the loss fraction. Guiding-centre trajectories of fusion-born alpha particles are traced using gyronimo and SIMPLE codes under the NEAT framework, showing good numerical agreement. Discrepancies between near-axis and magnetohydrodynamic fields have minor effects on passing particles but significant effects on trapped particles, especially in quasi-helically symmetric magnetic fields. Effective expressions were found for estimating orbit widths and passing–trapped separatrix in quasi-symmetric near-axis fields. Loss fractions agree in the prompt losses regime but diverge afterwards.