John Krommes

• phone: 609-243-2606
• email: krommes@pppl.gov

Prof. Krommes is a Principal Research Physicist at the Plasma Physics Laboratory and a Lecturer With the Rank of Professor in the Dept. of Astrophysical Sciences (Plasma Physics Program); he was formerly an Associated Faculty Member of Princeton's Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. He received his B. Sci. degree (summa cum laude) in 1971 from the Pennsylvania State University, where he majored in Engineering Science. In 1975 he received the Ph. D. degree from Princeton University Dept. of Astrophysical Sciences, presenting under the supervision of Carl Oberman a dissertation entitled “On Renormalized Kinetic Theories of Anomalous Transport due to Hydrodynamic Fluctuations in Strongly Magnetized Plasma.” He then enjoyed a two-year post-doctoral appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study under the supervision of Marshall Rosenbluth, where among other things he worked on the theory of trapped-ion modes and the unification of various theories of plasma turbulence.

Prof. Krommes returned to PPPL in 1977, where he has remained ever since (except for two extended research leaves at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara). He teaches a second-year graduate course on kinetic theory and irreversible processes, as well as an advanced course on plasma and fluid turbulence. His research interests have included the theory of transport in stochastic magnetic fields; statistical theories of turbulence; nonlinear gyrokinetics, including gyrokinetic noise; rigorous bounds on turbulent transport; zonal flow generation; systematic bifurcation theory for the onset of turbulence; intermittency, including blob formation; and projection-operator methods for the derivation of linear and nonlinear transport equations. A side interest is Literate Computer Programming: he is the author of the widely used FWEB suite of preprocessors.

Prof. Krommes is the recipient of a number of awards: in 1984 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society; in 2002 he was named a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory; in 2005 he received the Graduate Mentoring Award from Princeton University; in 2011 he was named an “Outstanding Referee” by Physical Review Letters; and in 2014 his publication on stochastic magnetic fields was named by the Editorial Board of the J. Plasma Phys. as one of 12 “Classic J. Plasma Phys. papers.”

• "Fundamental statistical theories of plasma turbulence in magnetic fields"
  J.A. Krommes, Phys. Reports 360, 1 (2002)
• "Nonequilibrium gyrokinetic fluctuation theory and sampling noise in gyrokinetic particle-in-cell simulations"
  J.A. Krommes, Phys. Plasmas 14, 090501 (2007)
• "The gyrokinetic description of microturbulence in magnetized plasmas"
  J.A. Krommes, Annu. Rev. Fluid Mech. 44, 175 (2012)
• "Plasma transport in stochastic magnetic fields. Part 3. Kinetics of test particle diffusion"
  John A. Krommes, Carl Oberman & Robert G. Kleva, J. Plasma Phys. 30, 11 (1983)
• "A tutorial introduction to the statistical theory of turbulent plasmas, a half-century after Kadomtsev’s Plasma Turbulence and the resonance-broadening theory of Dupree and Weinstock"
  John A. Krommes, J. Plasma Phys. Lecture Notes, 81 (2015)

• DOE highlight, 2017 : Zonostrophic Instability and the Onset of the Dimits Shift