To efficiently generate electricity in a magnetic fusion reactor, a hot plasma must be produced and confined for a sufficiently long time for numerous fusion reactions to take place. The instabilities that develop in the core of magnetically confined plasmas make this task a formidable challenge, by increasing the transport of particles and energy from the plasma core to the edge and/or destroying the magnetic topology. The influx of heavy impurity ions produced by the metal walls surrounding the plasma must also be carefully controlled to avoid confinement degradation by radiation losses due to impurity line emission. Understanding and controlling magnetohydrodynamic instabilities, collisional transport and turbulent transport in the plasma core is therefore one of the key issues in magnetic fusion.
As part of the research activities supported by ISFIN, particular attention will be paid to the impact of isotopic mass on plasma confinement (current fusion devices operate with H or D ions, whereas future reactors will be based on a D-T mixture), and to the development of the reduced models needed to describe plasma evolution and confinement within an integrated modeling framework.