Three IPP postdocs awarded EUROfusion research fellowships

IPP physicist Mike Dunne, Gergly Papp and Matthias Willensdorfer have been granted a fellowship from the European Fusion Programme

IPP physicists Dr. Mike Dunne, Dr. Gergly Papp and Dr. Matthias Willensdorfer were among the eleven candidates who successfully applied for a research fellowship from the European Fusion Programme, coordinated by EUROfusion. The fellowship programme promotes scientifically outstanding postdoc fusion research physicists and engineers working on a topic important to the fusion research programme.

Dr. Mike Dunne has been at IPP since 2012, first as a visiting scientist from University Cork and then as a postdoc since 2013. The fellowship will help him in the next two years to investigate the stability of plasma discharges in Garching’s ASDEX Upgrade fusion device, when the plasma is refuelled with nitrogen or hydrogen pellets.

Dr. Corgely Papp took his PhD in 2013 and then joined IPP at Garching in 2013 as a postdoc of Max Planck Priceton Center for Plasma Physics. His research is concerned with the dynamics of fast electrons, which can occur in the event of current disruptions in tokamak plasmas. The objective is to model computationally the physical processes involved and compare them with the experiment.

Dr. Matthias Willensdorfer, a postdoc at IPP in Garching since the end of 2013, is responsible for the electron cyclotron emission diagnostics at ASDEX Upgrade, a diagnostic for determining the electron temperature of the plasma. His fellowship will serve to investigate the influence of magnetic perturbation fields on the motion of the plasma particles.

The fellowships from the EUROfusion programme are presented annually for a two-year period.