On October 31,  2024, Prof. Fulvio Zonca delivered a significant presentation titled  "Structure formation and transport in magnetized fusion plasmas" at  ASIPP. The event took place in the main auditorium, filled with  enthusiastic scientists and students. Prof. Zonca showcased his  expertise by discussing the complexities of plasma dynamics and the  balance between magnetic confinement and plasma turbulence under the theory framework of phase space transport.

In Prof. Zonca’s talk,  he addressed that burning plasma is a complex self-organized system with  many interacting degrees of freedom, which yield a variety of  interesting nonlinear behaviors characterized by a broad range of  spatiotemporal scales, and that energetic particles play important roles  as the mediator of cross-scale couplings. He proposed that, for the  development of prediction capability required for ITER-like tokamaks, it  is essential to understand the burning plasma nonlinear dynamics on  long time scales comparable to energy confinement time. With his  collaborators, Prof. Zonca developed the first-principle transport  theory based on “Dyson-Schroedinger model”, where the turbulence  evolution is described by nonlinear Schroedinger equation, while the  self-consistent nonlinear evolution of particle distribution function  (phase space zonal structure) is described by the Dyson equation. Examples of applications  to cases of practical interest are also given, focusing on simplified  paradigmatic cases for illustrating the workflow of the Advanced  Transport model for Energetic Particle (ATEP) code. In particular, the case of neutral beam injected particles in ITER is shown, which are redistributed under the action of Coulomb collisions and a fixed amplitude toroidal Alfvén eigenmode.