The University of Warwick is globally connected, forward-looking and entrepreneurial. We create new ways of thinking and achieving: making us stand out from our competitors and the more ‘traditional universities’ and creating an inspiring place to study and undertake research.
Warwick is one of the UK’s great success stories. In less than fifty years since being founded we’ve become one of the UK’s best universities, consistently at the top of UK league tables and we’re rapidly climbing the international league tables of world class universities.
We’re a university that champions independent thinking and as well as being founded, first and foremost, on academic excellence, a key driver of the Warwick success story so far is our entrepreneurial spirit - a key strength is our relevance to society and our close links with business and industry. Companies tap into Warwick knowledge to develop their own strengths and ensure they remain at the cutting edge within their industries. And that cutting edge insight is developed out of truly world class research: Warwick ranks 7th overall in the UK according to the latest Research Assessment Exercise.
To understand how Warwick has come so far in such a short space of time is to understand the character of the University. The success of Warwick, underpinned by innovation, entrepreneurialism and academic excellence, is driven by the exceptional talent of our staff, students and alumni.
Some of the most fascinating intellectual challenges in plasma physics arise from the generic requirement to understand self-consistent nonlinear phenomenology. For example, recent CFSA projects have investigated cosmic ray acceleration at supernova remnant shocks, magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) wave dynamics, MHD coupling and flux emergence in the solar corona, nonlinear laser-plasma interactions, strong MHD turbulence, and avalanching transport in fusion plasmas.
Such phenomena also present some of the key challenges to HPC, and CFSA develops codes that cover the full range of spatiotemporal scales: Particle-in-Cell, which addresses the many-particle Maxwell-Lorentz system; Vlasov, which combines Maxwell’s equations with a kinetic description of the plasma; Hybrid treatments of kinetic ions and fluid electrons; and adaptive MHD.
The Centre specialises in developing and applying novel theoretical approaches to global plasma behaviour, and to the analysis of plasma data. For example, complex systems approaches for out-of-equilibrium phenomena are applied to plasma confinement, both in the solar system and in the fusion context.
