This year, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the “Theory Festival”, organized since 2001 every other year in Aix-en-Provence. This international scientific event was created under the leadership of Jean Jacquinot, current scientific advisor to the ITER Director General Bernard Bigot. Professor Pat Diamond (UCSD) and Xavier Garbet have been the scientific director since 2001, and Guilhem Dif-Pradalier is currently the scientific secretary and lead organizer. The website (http://festival-theorie.org/) will soon host all the presentations.
The interdisciplinary format and the long duration (4 weeks since 2017, 3 initially) of the Theory Festival fulfill a triple ambition:
- to bring together the best world theorists of non-linear physics of fusion plasmas by magnetic confinement and in domains such as solar physics, dynamo, geophysics or statistical physics
- to advance on key issues for ITER and beyond by feeding on the fruitful interplay of several disciplines,
- and train young researchers.
In this context, courses are dedicated to them, and the last two weeks are reserved for work around individual research mini-projects supervised by senior researchers and led by David Zarzoso (AMU). Many publications were produced out of projects initiated during the last festival in 2017. They were presented this year in this 10th edition of the Festival.
Big names punctuate the history of the Festival. Among others, Professor Roald Sagdeev in 2013 and 2019 – one of the founding fathers of the Russian fusion program, members of the French Academy of Sciences (Stephan Fauve in 2013, Yves Pomeau and Uriel Frisch in 2015, 2017 and 2019) as well as internationally renowned experts such as Gregory Falkovich in 2007, Michael Mc Intyre in 2009, Zhensu She in 2013, Keith Moffatt in 2015 and Nigel Goldenfeld in 2017. Edward Ott is the distinguished contributor to this year’s conference.
This event is also the occasion for Alain Bécoulet (head of IRFM/CEA) to award a young researcher with the “René Pellat Memorial Festival Prize” for his remarkable work in Plasma Physics. This year the winner is Zhibin Guo associate professor at Peking University, succeeding 2017’winners Haiong Che.
