Josh Breslau

Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

Josh Breslau is a staff 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 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 his postdoctoral and subsequent work, also at PPPL, Dr. Breslau joined the group responsible for 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. Another research interest is the development of improved numerical methods for plasma simulation, including the application of high-order, C1-continuous finite elements to the M3D model.