Allan Reiman is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and a Lecturer with Rank of Professor at Princeton University. He was the head of the Plasma Configuration Design Group for the National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX) from 1997 to 2000.  He was Interim Head of the PPPL Theory Department from October 2009 to May 2010.  In FY 2012 he led the OFES Joule Milestone effort, focusing on nonaxisymmetric plasma equilibrium calculations, involving 13 people and 4 institutions.  This was followed up by a multi-institutional cross benchmarking study of nonaxysymmetric plasma equilibrium calculations led by Professor Reiman whose results were published in the journal Nuclear Fusion in 2015.

Prof. Reiman’s personal research has focused particularly on plasma equilibria with non integrable magnetic field line trajectories. With a collaborator, he wrote the first plasma equilibrium code capable of handling non integrable field lines, and the code has evolved over the years.  He collaborated with the German design group on calculations with the code for the W7X stellarator, and he helped in the use of the code in the design of the NCSX stellarator.  He used the code to discover that the observed limit on the plasma pressure that could be supported in the W7AS stellarator device in Germany was caused by the emergence of a region of chaotic field line trajectories, obtaining quantitative agreement with the experimental observations.  His present research focus is on the growth and suppression of magnetic islands in plasma magnetic confinement devices. He also has an interest in tokamak improvement via the addition of nonaxisymmetric coils, showing, in a 2007 Phys. Rev. Letter, that the dangerous vertical mode can be stabilized by a simple set of nonaxisymmetric coils placed at the bottom and top of the tokamak.

Role in the project: Professor Reiman has extensive experience in stellarator optimization, and he will lend his expertise to the group as it designs new and improved stellarators.