Curriculum of Jean-Henri Weisen
1.0 Personal data
|
Birth date: 22.4.1957 Birth place: Lappeenranta, Finland Citizenship: Grand Duchy of Luxembourg
Professional address: Centre de Recherches en Physique des Plasmas,
e-mail: weisen.henri(at)epfl.ch |
 |
2.0 Education
Primary: 1963-1969, École primaire de Niedercorn, Luxembourg
Secondary: 1969-1971, Lycée Michel Rodange, Luxembourg
1971-1974, Collège de Béthusy, Lausanne, Switzerland
1974-1976, Gymnase de la Cité, Lausanne
1976, Swiss maturity certificate, type C (maths-sciences)
(with two prizes, one for overall excellence and one for excellence in literary disciplines)
Undergraduate: 1976-1977, First year of medical school, University of Lausanne
(with successful first year examination).
1977-1982, Physical engineering studies at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Diplôme d'ingénieur physicien obtained in 1982.
Postgraduate: 1982-1986, Doctoral work at the Centre de Recherches en Physique des Plasmas (CRPP), EPFL. Grade de docteur ès sciences (PhD) obtained for presentation of thesis number 659 (1986) at the department of physics of the EPFL
3.0 Language skills
Fluent in French, English, German and Luxembourg languages. Basic knowledge of Finnish.
4.0 Professional curriculum
1982-1986: Assistant at CRPP, EPFL. Thesis work with title "The phase contrast method applied to the observation of density fluctuations in the TCA tokamak".
1987-May 1988: Continuation at CRPP of experimental research on wave physics in hot plasmas.
May 1988-end 1990: Post-doctoral appointment at the JET (Joint European Torus) experiment on controlled magnetic fusion research, Abingdon, UK, with participation in charge exchange spectroscopy, x-ray measurements, confinement and fusion reactivity studies.
1991-today: Scientific staff member at CRPP, EPFL, currently as `adjoint scientifique'.
September 2001-September 2002: Seconded to EFDA-JET, Abingdon, UK, as deputy Task Force Leader for the Task Force `Diagnostics'.
4.1 Activities at CRPP
The majority of my activities are connected with the TCV (Tokamak à Configuration Variable) device at CRPP, EPFL which started operating in 1992. TCV is a medium size tokamak (plasma current up to 1 MA) with extreme flexibility for plasma shaping. The main purpose of the device is to investigate the importance of plasma shaping for confinement and MHD stability, as well as Electron Cyclotron Heating (ECH) and current drive (ECCD) physics.
Group leader since 1991 for plasma diagnostics on TCV (approximately 20 diagnosticians): This task includes identifying the diagnostics requirements for the future scientific programme, supervising the development and the integration of a coherent set of instrumentation and of data analysis procedures to allow the scientific exploitation of TCV. I have initiated formal collaborations with teams from several countries with the aim of perfecting diagnostics on TCV and am directly responsible for collaborations with the Czech Academy of Sciences and the KFKI institute in Budapest.
Researcher: I initiate, lead or participate to, the research activities on TCV. My current interests and research activities are aimed at understanding transport in fusion plasmas, particularly particle and impurity transport and are reflected in the most recent publications.
Member of the scientific coordination committee for TCV: This committee is responsible for coordinating the scientific and experimental programme of the TCV device.
Lecturer at the department of physics of the EPFL: Together with colleagues I teach post-graduate courses on plasma diagnostics in fusion plasmas since 1994.
Ivo Furno, 1997-2001, `Fast transient transportphenomena measured by soft X-ray emission in TCV tokamak plasmas'.
Patrick Blanchard, 1998-2002: `Etudes du rayonnement suprathermique émis lors du chauffage cyclotronique électronique du plasma du tokamal TCV'.
Edgar Scavino, 1998-2003 : `Transport of laser-ablated impurities in TCV'.
Paolo Bosshard: 1998-2001: on charge exchange spectroscopy in TCV. This student has finished his PhD under the direction of a colleague.
Alexey Zabolotskiy, 2001-2005 : Particle transport in tokamak plasmas.
Mikhail Maslov, 2005- : Convective particle transport in JET and TCV (tentative)
Alexandra Zhuchkova, 2005- : Faraday rotation measurements of poloidal magnetic fields in TCV and JET (tentative)
Session leader: I am one of the experimental session leaders for TCV.
4.2 Activities outside CRPP
Societies: Individual member of the European Physical Society (EPS), the Swiss Physical Society (SPS) and the Association Vaudoise des Chercheurs en Physique (AVCP). The latter is a 250-member society in French-speaking Switzerland which I presided from 1983 to 1985 and was secretary of from 1999-2001.
Evaluations, committees, international workgroups:
I have evaluated 3 research project submitted to the Czech Grant Agency (two of these concerned tokamak physics and one astrophysical instrumentation) and one for FOM (Netherlands, on fusion plasma diagnostics).
I was a member of the Ad-Hoc Group for evaluating the proposal "Tangential Neutral Beam Injector and Reactive Power compensation for ASDEX-Upgrade" submitted by IPP Graching for preferential EURATOM support (30-31.3.1998).
Academy appraisal commission of the Czech Academy of Sciences: I participated as a foreign expert to this commission in May 1995 to evaluate the scientific standing and quality of the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague (120 members of staff).
I am a member of the International Advisory Board of the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The IPP Prague created this body to help its intergration into the Euratom `family'.
I was member of the commission de recherche (a misnomer for an independent commission for the surveillance of progress and quality of doctoral work) of the department of physics of the EPFL from 1998-2001.
I was a member of the ITER (now ITPA) expert group on pedestal physics from 1998-2001.
Member and spokesperson of the ITPA expert group on particle transport since 2005
Member of the ITPA expert group on diagnostics since 2005
Coordinator for particle transport within the JET Transport Task Force
I was a jury member at the PhD defence of PhD candidates at the University of Marseille(2000) and at the Technical University of Eindhoven (2001).
Organizer of the 36th annual course of the above mentioned AVCP entitled "The challenges of magnetic fusion research" and editor of the book with the same title. The course took place in Grimentz (Switzerland) from March 21-26th, 1994.
Member of the programme committee for the 23rd EPS conference on Controlled Fusion and Plasma Physics, Kiev, Ukraine, June 24-28th, 1996.
Member of the programme committee of the 4th EFPW (European Fusion Physics Workshop), Sollentuna, Sweden, December 1996.
Coauthor of the textbook: `Experimental methods of plasma diagnostics'
by V.I. Davydenko, A.A. Ivanov and H. Weisen
Textbook in Russian language published by Novosibirsk University, Publishing Department, ul. Prigova 2, RU 630090 Novosibirsk
(1999)
edited by A.A. Ivanov, Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, Novosibirsk
This book won the prize for the best scientific textbook published by
Novosibirsk University in 1999
Lectures on diagnostics for doctoral students at EPFL
4.3 Summary of scientific work
Chronological list of publications
4.3.1 Doctoral work
My career started with the proposal in 1982 of a novel laser diagnostic for the measurement of density fluctuations in hot plasmas (ref). The instrument is based on the phase contrast method (ref) of microscopy invented in 1934 by the Dutch physicist Zernike. It was the tool which in 1985 allowed the first observation and identification of the Kinetic Alfvén Wave, which is produced by mode conversion at the Shear Alfvén resonance layer in Alfvén Wave heating experiments in toroidally confined plasmas, such as the TCA tokamak operated by CRPP at the time. The observation of the mode converted wave (ref), which had been predicted 10 years earlier by Hasegawa and Chen, can be considered to be a milestone in the validation of kinetic theory. The direct visualisation of this wave with well known resonance properties also allowed a determination of the safety factor in the core of the TCA tokamak (ref). The new diagnostic also confirmed the existence of large amplitude, long wavelength plasma turbulence which was expected by some theories as a result of wavenumber space inverse cascading, but was inaccessible to the traditional laser scattering diagnostics, which were in use on other experiments at the time (ref). The phase contrast method has since been successfully adopted for fluctuation measurements in small devices in China and Japan, and most importantly on the DIII-D tokamak at General Atomics, San Diego, USA and on the ALCATOR C-MOD tokamak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA. (The 1997 APS Division of Plasma Physics prize for the best PhD thesis was awarded to Dr. S. Coda, then at MIT, now at CRPP, for his work using the phase contrast method and initiated with my help.)
4.3.2 Post-doctoral work (1988-90)
As a member of the charge exchange spectroscopy team at the Joint European Torus (JET) under Dr. Manfred von Hellermann, I was in charge of interpreting spectroscopic data and to deduce ion temperature and rotation profiles which were made available to the entire JET team (ref). The most important original work of my time at the JET experiment was the investigation I led on the observation of the loss of energetic ions from the plasma and the existence of high temperatures in close proximity of the plasma boundary (a few keV in the H-mode of confinement), by integrating complementary information from several groups (ref). These `pedestals' are now an accepted fact, but they were very controversial at the time. Their existence contributes substantially to confinement and fusion performance and the `pedestal' temperature is a crucial (free) input parameter for predicting the confinement and ignition capability of a fusion reactor by numerical simulation of plasma turbulence. Whilst working at JET, I also devised a novel method for deducing light impurity concentrations from X-ray measurements (ref).
4.3.3 Work on TCV and JET after 1992
I contribute to the overall research efforts of the TCV group, which is focussed on ECH, ECCD and confinement. Whilst being in charge of coordinating the overall diagnostics implementation, I was directly responsible for the development of a 200 channel X-ray tomography system (ref), a novel AXUV diode bolometry system (ref) and a multilayer mirror ultrasoft X-ray spectrometer (ref) in collaboration with the Czech Academy of Sciences, as well as the procurement of a 50kV diagnostic neutral diagnostic beam.
In addition I have carried out topical research, usually together with one of my students or colleagues, such as an investigation on the effect of plasma shape on confinement and MHD behaviour (ref). The result of this investigation is that for a given mode of confinement the effect of shape on global confinement can be described by a single geometrical parameter (the shape enhancement factor) which is suitable for correcting existing energy confinement scaling laws (ref), many of which have an unsatisfactory description of the effect of shape. I'm also the author of an early investigation on H-modes and ELMs in TCV (ref). More recently I got interested in the context of profile shapes in the context of variably shaped plasmas, with the main result that profiles shapes in sawtoothing Ohmic L-mode plasmas depend solely on the parameter <j>/(q0j0) (ref). This observation led to a fruitful collaboration with a theoretical colleague in Milano, Prof. E. Minardi, who developed a theory to explain the observed behaviour on the basis of a magnetic entropy principle (ref). My most recent research work is concerned with anomalous particle (ref) and impurity transport, both on TCV and JET, as reflected in the most recent publications.
Invited papers at conferences and workshops
I1) Investigation of density fluctuations on the tokamak TCA using the phase contrast method
2nd symposium on laser-aided plasma diagnostics,
Culham, UK, September 10-12 1985
I2) The phase contrast technique as an imaging diagnostic for plasma density fluctuations.
7th topical meeting on high temperature diagnostics of the American Physical Society, Napa (CA), March 13-17 1988.
I3) Alfvén wave propagation and safety factor profile measurements in the TCA tokamak.
4th symposium on laser aided plasma diagnostics, Fukuoka, Japan, November 20-23, 1989.
I4) Recent results from the TCV tokamak
17th Symposium on Plasma Physics and Technology, Prague, June 13-16, 1995.
I5) Ohmic H-modes in TCV
Invited paper at the US-Japan workshop on H-mode physics, September 1995.
I6) Edge Localized Modes
Invited paper at the 3rd European Fusion Physics Workshop, Sevilla, December 1995.
I7) Effect of edge localized modes on confinement in TCV
EU-US workshop on transport in fusion plasmas, Varenna, Sept. 2-5, 1996.
I8) Confinement optimization by plasma shaping
4th European Fusion Physics Workshop, Sollentuna (Sweden), December 1996.
I9) Effect of plasma shaping on confinement and MHD behaviour in TCV L- and H-mode discharges.
24th European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, Berchtesgaden (D), June 1997.
I10) Physique et applications des plasmas.
Conférence publique donnée le 27.11.1997 au Centre Universitaire de Luxembourg dans le cadre du cycle de conférences "Les chercheurs luxembourgeois à l'étranger".
I11) Overview of TCV Results
IAEA Fusion Energy Conference, Sorrento, (I) September 2000
I12) Anomalous particle
and impurity transport
11th European Fusion Physics Workshop, 8-10.12.2003, Heraklion (Grece)