Carson Cook

Carson worked on the SIESTA (Spectral Iterative Equilibrium Solver for Toroidal Applications) code development project with Steve Hirshman and Raul Sanchez of ORNL. SIESTA is a magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium code used for modeling toroidal plasmas in 3D systems. Unlike VMEC, SIESTA does not assume nested magnetic flux surfaces, so equilibria involving magnetic islands and stochastic regions can be computed. The code is very scalable, a necessary feature for ITER-relevant calculations. SIESTA is useful for equilibrium analysis in perturbed tokamaks and stellarator modeling and design.