Part of the MIT PSFC Disruption Studies Group at the 2025 APS-DPP meeting in Long Beach, CA.

The 67th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics was held in Long Beach, California, from November 17–21, 2025.

Members of the MIT PSFC Disruption Group participated actively, contributing several oral and poster presentations. The Disruptions group presented on a wide variety of topics, with research in support of SPARC continuing to dominate the content. However, for the first time, work in support of the ARC pilot plant also made a showing; both from the Disruptions Group and our CFS collaborators.

In the MFE: Disruptions and Control oral session, graduating PhD student Allen Wang, as well as postdocs Arunav Kumar, Enrico Panontin, and Rishabh Datta gave talks on the development of surrogate models for inverse Grad-Shafranov solvers and vertical stability, and Hard X-ray synthetic diagnostics for Runaway Electron (RE) detection and the investigation of 3D effects on their generation in SPARC. In the MFE: High Field Tokamaks oral session, Scientists Cristina Rea and Cesar Clauser presented on the ongoing development of an Off-Normal Warning system for SPARC and simulations of both hot and cold VDEs on ARC. And within the MFE: Research in Support of ITER oral session, graduating PhD student Andrew Maris gave a talk on the collisionality scaling of H-mode density limits.

Throughout the MFE: Analytical, computational, AI/ML techniques, MFE: High Field Tokamaks, and MFE: MHD and stability poster sessions, the Disruptions group presented 14 posters, covering a wide range of topics from software tools for disruption analysis, to simulations of disruptions, plasma stability, SPARC magnetics, and more. More than half of these presentations focused on SPARC, but many also discussed topics generalizable to any machine.

For more details on the various contributions, refer to the table below. The complete scientific program is available on the APS-DPP website.

Presenter Type Title Session
A Maris Oral Collisionality scaling of the tokamak density limit: data-driven analysis, cross-device prediction, and real-time avoidance BO04.5
C Rea Oral Research in support of the SPARC Off-Normal Warning System JO04.9
C Clauser Oral Assessment of Cold and Hot Vertical Displacement Events in ARC-like plasmas JO04.14
R Datta Oral The effect of 3-D MHD activity on runaway electron generation during SPARC disruptions UO09.4
E Panontin Oral A synthetic diagnostic for Hard X-ray signal levels from runaway electrons on SPARC UO09.5
A Kumar Oral Physics-Guided Fast Surrogate for Real-Time Control of Vertical Stability and X-point targets in ARC-class Fusion Pilot Plant UO09.8
A Wang Oral Magnetic Control with an Inverse Grad-Shafranov Neural Network UO09.9
Z Keith Poster Enabling data-driven NTM studies with advanced mode labeling BP13.164
A Damsell Poster Assessment of vertical instability and passive stabilization in SPARC-like plasmas BP13.166
R Granetz Poster Status of the SPARC Magnetic Diagnostics NP13.141
L Murphy Poster Linear analysis of SPARC H-mode pedestal stability using M3D-C1 NP13.146
A Feyrer Poster Benchmarking runaway electron simulations in HEAT with Alcator C-Mod experiments NP13.152
R Chandra Poster Synthetic magnetic diagnostic integration on SPARC and C-Mod for MHD mode identification NP13.153
S Benjamin Poster Nonlinear tearing stability analysis of ARC and SPARC using a toroidal Rutherford equation coupled to STRIDE and resistive DCON NP13.154
AR Saperstein Poster Validation of simulated radiative collapse events in TORAX NP13.155
B Stein-Lubrano Poster Developments in SPARC disruption radiation modeling with Emis3D NP13.156
H Wietfeldt Poster Characterization of UFOs on Alcator C-Mod and WEST to inform SPARC operation NP13.157
Q Cheng Poster Accelerating High-Fidelity Parametric Thermal Quench Simulations via Neural Operator Preconditioning for Disruption Mitigation in Tokamaks NP13.158
EZ Cornejo Poster Time series classification algorithms for confinement regime identification in C-Mod NP13.163
GL Trevisan Poster A large-scale automated EFIT recomputation workflow for disruption studies at 1 kHz PP13.88
Y Wei Poster Scikit-disruption: machine learning toolkit for disruption analysis PP13.93