Turbulence and Sheared Flow

Achieving nuclear fusion in magnetically confined plasma has been frustrated by turbulence that rips the plasma apart. In his Perspective, Burrell discusses recent efforts to understand and control microturbulence-small-scale plasma eddies that dominate the loss of energy from tokamak plasmas. Such efforts include those reported by [ Lin et al. ][1] in the same issue, in which numerical simulations were used to examine the ability of velocity shear in the plasma to reduce microturbulence. [1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/281/5384/1835