Nuclear fusion is one of the avenues pursued to generate carbon-free energy for an increasingly demanding world, but technical instrumental concerns remain, which will impact the realisation and performance of future fusion power plants. The authors employ a combined experimental, computational and theoretical approach, to elucidate the mechanism by which turbulence spreading sets the divertor (a component that extracts heat and ash produced by the fusion reaction) heat load width in fusion tokamak, and demonstrate common trends in the upstream edge turbulence intensity flux, the pressure perturbation skewness, and the turbulence mixing length, which together determine the downstream heat load width.
- Zeyu Li
- Xi Chen
- George R. McKee
