The International Tokamak Physics Activity (ITPA) Central Committee has appointed DIFFER group leader and CCER member Dr. Jonathan Citrin as chair of its topical group on Transport and Confinement starting 1 January 2018.

The ITPA is an international framework organised by ITER for coordinating fusion research activities of the highest priority for preparing the broad physics basis needed for ITER design and operation. Members of the ITPA groups are chosen by each ITER party as representative top experts of their sub-fields. In the coming 2 years, Citrin will facilitate the group collaboration for updating the Physics Basis for ITER, a once-a-decade review of the status of the field.

Future fusion power plants will mimic the nuclear fusion process at the heart of the sun to generate clean energy from abundant resources. In a fusion reactor, careful attention needs to be given to how -for instance- temperature, density, and electric current are distributed throughout the hot fuel mass (a hot, ionized gas called a plasma).

The ITPA Transport and Confinement group provides insights from internationally coordinated experiments and modelling on the transport of heat, particles, momentum, and impurities in the fusion plasma. It uses those insights to design further experiments, improve fully predictive computer codes to predict transport in the plasma, and extrapolate to advanced scenarios to operate fusion reactors at high performance.