The project
Zonal Flows.
Winner
Dr Klaus Hallatschek
Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik
Boltzmannstraße 2
85748 Garching
Germany
Klaus Hallatschek, aged 35, has been conducting research in the tokamak physics department at the Max-Planck-Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP). He has established a strong reputation both in the field of plasmas and more widely in the study of turbulent flows. He was selected in 2005 for the "General Atomics Rosenbluth Fusion Theory Award", which funded research in General Atomics at San Diego where Hallatschek has been working for the last 8 months. He has worked as a visiting scientist for about 2 years in 2001 and 2002 at several institutions in the USA and Japan. Having studied the two subjects in parallel, he has a PhD in physics and a master in computer science (both summa cum laude). He obtained the Habilitation in theoretical physics from TU-Munich in January 2006.
He said: “It is exhilarating to receive this award. The independent funding will give me the freedom to explore the dynamics of the flows in all their facets, even beyond fusion science."
Provisional Award
€ 1,036,800
Project Description
At first sight, turbulence seems associated with the decay of ordered fluid motion into small unordered vortices. Yet in many practically important cases, turbulence driven by a temperature gradient tends to spontaneously organise itself into large-scale flows. Such flows are not only important in Hallatschek’s original field, turbulent fusion plasmas, but are also conspicuous in the atmosphere of giant gas planets, causing for example the coloured belts of Jupiter. Other examples can be found in the tachocline1 of the sun or in the striped ocean currents moving relative to the surrounding water. These flows, in return, have a dramatic effect on the level of the primary turbulence. Knowledge of the dynamical properties of the flows would thus help influence the behaviour of smaller systems under human control, such as magnetised plasmas in fusion reactors. On the other hand, an assessment of the long-term evolution of the flows including their metastable configurations would provide important information on planetary climates.
To date research has focused on the conditions for the formation of zonal flows. Hallatschek’s project will probe more deeply, into the non-linear dynamics underlying the turbulent forces on these zonal flows. From the outset this will involve state of the art computer codes based on gyro-kinetic and fluid representations of the medium and the electromagnetic fields therein.The computations necessary to characterise the flow dynamics will be carried out on massively parallel super computers and Linux computer clusters.
The project will study the turbulence in the atmosphere of gas planets as well as turbulence in plasmas immersed in toroidal and general three-dimensional magnetic fields. Finally, the study of nonlinearities will be carried even to extreme flow states as in the bifurcations that have been discovered in advanced fusion experiments.
NB: Zonal flow – gas planets: large scale flows in the east-west direction; in magnetic confinement devices: large scale flows in poloidal direction.
1 The tachocline is the transition region of the solar interior between the differentially rotating outer envelope and the uniformly rotating core – Wikipedia
