Burning Plasma Physicist

Proxima Fusion is Europe’s fastest-growing fusion company and the continent’s best-funded fusion player, and the first spin-out from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. Backed by more than 650 million euros, the company is developing the hardware and infrastructure needed to deliver the world’s first commercial stellarator fusion power plant, advancing the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator concept through two next-generation machines, Alpha and Stellaris. This Burning Plasma Physicist leads efforts to understand, model and optimize energetic particle behavior in reactor-scale stellarator plasmas, focusing on fast-ion confinement, energetic particle transport, and bulk plasma interactions mediated through Alfvénic activity, and develops advanced numerical tools to assess alpha particle confinement and guide stellarator optimization toward robust burning plasma operation.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the development, validation and application of advanced energetic particle transport workflows for assessing burning plasma physics in reactor-scale stellarator plasmas
• Investigate energetic particle driven instabilities, including Alfvén eigenmodes and related EP-MHD interactions, and assess their impact on plasma performance
• Ensure alpha particle confinement remains within the tolerable limits of plasma facing components under reactor-relevant operational scenarios
• Work closely with stellarator optimization teams to incorporate energetic particle physics constraints into magnetic configuration design
• Develop reduced-order models and analysis workflows to accelerate reactor design studies and scenario optimization

Requirements

Essential: postgraduate degree in plasma physics or a related discipline; strong expertise in energetic particle transport, burning plasma physics, or kinetic plasma instabilities; experience studying EP-MHD interactions, including Alfvén eigenmodes, fast-ion driven instabilities, or related wave-particle interaction physics; experience using advanced simulation tools for kinetic, orbit-following, gyrokinetic, or hybrid MHD modeling; proficiency in scientific programming languages such as Python, Julia, C++ and/or Fortran; comfort working across disciplines, collaborating closely with physicists and engineers on open-ended reactor design challenges; an initiative-taking, clearly communicating working style motivated by open-ended physics challenges critical to commercial fusion energy.

Desirable: none specified in the source listing.