High-Order Finite Elements for Tokamak Plasma Simulations – Application to next generation tokamaks

Organisation/Company Aix-Marseille Université Department M2P2 Research Field Physics » Computational physics Engineering » Nuclear engineering Researcher Profile Recognised Researcher (R2) Positions Postdoc Positions Application Deadline 15 Sep 2026 - 00:00 (Europe/Paris) Country France Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Hours Per Week 35 Offer Starting Date 1 Oct 2026 Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Not funded by a EU programme Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No

Offer Description

Context: Controlling heat and particle fluxes on tokamak walls is a critical challenge for future tokamaks. Achieving burning plasmas near ignition while ensuring sufficient power distribution on divertor components requires precise operational constraints. This necessitates the development of optimized scenarios, capable of managing heat flow from the thermonuclear core to the divertor. Reliable numerical simulations with advanced capabilities are essential to predict turbulent transport and plasma-wall interactions in realistic geometries.

Objective : A 2-year postdoctoral position (renewable) is available at the M2P2 Laboratory (Marseille), in collaboration with the Fusion Modeling Research Group at CEA Cadarache. The successful candidate will contribute to the operation and development of SOLEDGE-HDG, a cutting-edge Hybridizable Discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) code (Giorgiani et al., JCP 2018). This code enables high-fidelity simulations of plasma transport under realistic tokamak conditions.

Innovation : Unlike most existing fusion codes, SOLEDGE-HDG employs a high-order numerical scheme, allowing the use of meshes independent of magnetic field lines or flux surfaces. This flexibility enables simulations of heat exhaust physics in non-steady magnetic configurations, a groundbreaking capability in plasma transport modeling. Such conditions are critical in various plasma scenarios, including:

• Plasma breakdown
• Current ramp-up (transition from limiter to divertor configuration)
• Flat-top operation (e.g., divertor strike point sweeping, MHD relaxation events like sawteeth)

Additionally, the solver’s compatibility with unstructured meshes ensures accurate discretization of any realistic tokamak chamber.

Responsibilities: The candidate will:

• Optimize and enhance the HDG code (e.g., implementation of Asymptotic-Preserving (AP) schemes, module coupling, reduced model integration, …).
• Perform advanced simulations for next-generation tokamaks (e.g., ITER, SPARC, …), in close collaboration with experimental analyses, particularly on WEST (west.cea.fr) for code validation.
• Work in a multidisciplinary environment, bridging applied mathematics, numerical methods, and plasma physics.

Requirements

Research Field Physics » Computational physics Education Level PhD or equivalent

Skills/Qualifications

• PhD in Applied Mathematics, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Plasma physics with a numerical modelling activity.
• Demonstrated expertise in finite-element methods or related numerical techniques.
• Experience in code development, HPC architectures, and parallel programming is highly desirable.