Abstract
On the basis of several recent breakthroughs in fusion research, many activities have been launched around the world to develop fusion power plants on the fastest possible time scale. In this context, high-fidelity simulations of the plasma behavior on large supercomputers provide one of the main pathways to accelerating progress by guiding crucial design decisions. When it comes to determining the energy confinement time of a magnetic confinement fusion device, which is a key quantity of interest, gyrokinetic turbulence simulations are considered the approach of choice – but the question, whether they are really able to reliably predict the plasma behavior is still open. The present study addresses this important issue by means of careful comparisons between state-of-the-art gyrokinetic turbulence simulations with the GENE code and experimental observations in the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak for an unprecedented number of simultaneous plasma observables.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 2558 |
| Journal | Nature Communications |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 2025 |
Funding
We are grateful to Clemente Angioni for fruitful discussions. This work has been carried out within the framework of the EUROfusion Consortium, funded by the European Union via the Euratom Research and Training Programme (Grant Agreement No 101052200 — EUROfusion). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the European Commission can be held responsible for them. This work is supported by the US Department of Energy under grants DE-SC0014264, DE-SC0006419, and DE-SC0017381. The authors are grateful for the computing time provided on the Raven HPC system at the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility (MPCDF), the EUROfusion high-performance computer at CINECA (Bologna), and the GCS supercomputer HAWK at the Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum Stuttgart ( www.hlrs.de ) via the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing ( www.gauss-centre.eu ).