Critically important to safe and reliable operation of any magnetically-confined fusion reactor is optimization of the plasma boundary. The boundary of the plasma (comprised of an open field line region called the Scrape-Off Layer, SOL, and divertor regions) must be specially optimized for heat and particle exhaust. Both aspects present a serious challenge in a reactor. Heat fluxes on a reactor scale tend to be far above current material engineering limitations (>10MWm^-2) and without radiative dissipation would lead to destruction of material surfaces. Simultaneously, the Helium ash must be pumped sufficiently to avoid dilution of the confined plasma, which otherwise could lead to a loss of fusion power output. While both topics are highly complex in any magnetically-confined fusion device (neutral transport, atomic physics, and plasma physics on various scales all playing important roles), the physics of the stellarator boundary are uniquely complex due to the 3D geometry and nearly endless possible different magnetic geometries that are possible in comparison to a tokamak. While this allows us many degrees of freedom in tuning the transport to achieve optimized heat and particle exhaust, it also means that we are still only in the early stages of understanding how to most efficiently optimize the stellarator boundary. With the fast timescale envisioned by fusion start-ups, we require significantly more manpower in this field to bring us to a technological maturity level where we are confident we can build a working stellarator reactor. The SOLARIS Young Investigator's Group aims to advance the physics basis of the stellarator boundary via detailed experimental validation of our current and upcoming modeling capabilities. We are equally interested in experimental and numerical work and aim to focus our attention on how performance scales with experiment/reactor size. Our group is highly international and we also maintain connections with highly international teams: we have a close collaboration with the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik (DE), and plan collaborations with EPFL (CH), DIFFER (NL), University of Wisconsin - Madison (USA) and Auburn University (USA). 

The SOLARIS Young Investigator's Group is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) and has been active at the Uni Greifswald campus since 01.06.2025. When available, open positions will be posted here. Even when no open positions are listed, the group actively invites students who are interested in a Master's or internship project to contact Dr. Victoria Winters at victoria.winters@uni-greifswald.de.