September 11, 2025
Understanding Plasma Turbulence through Exact Coherent Spacetime Structures
Our work, “Understanding Plasma Turbulence Through Exact Coherent Spacetime Structures”, by Sidney D. V. Williams, Matthew N. Gudorf, and Dmitri M. Orlov, was published in Physics of Plasmas 32, 092302 (2025).
The paper addresses one of the central challenges in fusion research: plasma turbulence and its role in cross-field transport. It introduces a framework based on nonlinear dynamics and periodic orbit theory to analyze turbulence in terms of exact coherent spacetime structures—recurrent patterns that form the underlying skeleton of turbulent dynamics.
Using the Kuramoto–Sivashinsky equation as a reduced model, the study identifies a catalog of these recurrent solutions and shows that statistical averages such as energy, dissipation, and transport properties can be reconstructed from them. This approach demonstrates how seemingly chaotic turbulence can be decomposed into predictable building blocks, opening a pathway toward more physically grounded models of plasma transport.
Read the full article here: https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pop/article/32/9/092302/3362849/Understanding-plasma-turbulence-through-exact