Dr. Breslau is a research physicist in the Theory department at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). He received a B.S. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in 1995 and a Ph.D. in plasma physics from Princeton in 2001. His doctoral research, with Dr. Stephen Jardin, involved a numerical study of fast collisionless magnetic reconnection in merging spheromaks and flux tubes with an original parallel semi-implicit fluid code. For this work, he was awarded the Procter Honorific Fellowship by Princeton University. During this period, he also conducted research with Steven Hirshman at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory into compact spectral representations of magnetic flux surfaces for use in a tokamak/stellarator equilibrium code.
For his postdoctoral and subsequent work, also at PPPL, Dr. Breslau joined the group responsible for the development and maintenance of the Multilevel 3D (M3D) code, a large nonlinear extended MHD/hybrid code for the study of macroscopic stability in toroidal plasma devices. His research topics with this code have included detailed studies of the formation of "current holes" observed in JET discharges; and extensive modeling of resistive internal kink instabilities that result in temperature profile flattening and given rise to "sawteeth" in the X-ray signals in tokamaks, for which he was a 2009 recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).
Dr. Breslau now divides his research time between investigation of tokamak macroinstabilities with M3D and M3D-C1; and conceptual design of transport-optimized quasi-symmetric stellarator plasma configurations and simplified coil sets for producing them.
P.O. Box 451
Princeton, NJ 08543-0451 U.S.A
Tel: (609) 243-2000
