Plasma turbulence and spectroscopy research
to advance the scientific basis for magnetic fusion energy

Welcome to the website for the Plasma Turbulence and Spectroscopy Group in the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics. We develop spectroscopy diagnostic systems and measurement techniques to investigate the turbulence and transport properties of magnetically confined plasma. Prof. Benedikt Geiger and Dr. George McKee lead our group. We recruit motivated and talented graduate students and postdocs every year, so please reach out if you are interested in joining us.

Our research activities include:

  • Investigations of ion gyro-scale turbulence and instabilities with 2D Beam Emission Spectroscopy
  • Turbulent impurity transport in 3D magnetic configurations
  • High-speed charge-exchange measurements for carbon impurities
  • Localized electric and magnetic field fluctuation measurements with spatial heterodyne spectroscopy
  • Machine learning models (edge ML) for real-time Beam Emission Spectroscopy analysis and plasma control
  • Learn more about our research »

To carry out our research activities, we operate turbulence and spectroscopy diagnostic systems at several fusion experiments:

  • DIII-D tokamak at General Atomics in San Diego, CA
  • NSTX-U spherical torus at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL) in Princeton, NJ
  • HSX stellarator at UW-Madison
  • W7-X stellarator at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald, Germany
  • HL-2A/HL-2M tokamaks at the Southwest Institute of Physics (SWIP) in Chengdu, China