Rishabh Datta is a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Rishabh works on the computational modeling of disruptions and runaway electrons in fusion plasmas. He completed his Ph.D. at MIT in 2024, investigating the effects of radiative heat transfer in shocks and magnetic reconnection. Click here for Rishabh's CV.
Rishabh Datta is a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Rishabh works on the computational modeling of disruptions and runaway electrons in fusion plasmas. He completed his Ph.D. at MIT in 2024, investigating the effects of radiative heat transfer in shocks and magnetic reconnection. Click here for Rishabh's CV.
Fusion Energy and Disruption Mitigation
Runaway electrons (REs) are energetic electron populations accelerated to relativistic energies during disruption or startup events in tokamaks. REs can carry a significant amount of current and cause catastrophic damage to plasma-facing components. This project focuses on multi-scale coupling of runaways to MHD activity during disruption events on next-generation tokamaks and the evaluation of strategies to mitigate them.
Phys. Plasmas. (2025) [Paper]
Preprint (Sub. Nucl. Fusion) (2025) [Paper]
The GIF below shows the evolution of a (1,1) resitive kink instability in an M3D-C1 simulation with self-consistent MHD + RE coupling.
Laboratory Astrophysics and HEDP
Reconnection occurs in a radiatively cooled regime in many astrophysical plasmas, such as in the solar coronal, black hole accretion disks and their coronae, pulsar magnetospheres, and gamma-ray bursts. Our experiments on the Z Machine were the first to access a regime that shows plasmoid formation and strong radiative cooling. X-ray and visible spectroscopy, X-ray imaging, X-ray diodes and inductive probes were used to characterize the experiments, which were supplemented with three-dimensional radiative resistive magnetohydrodynamic simulations.
Editor's Suggestion. Phys. Rev. Lett. (2024) [Paper]
Editor's Pick. Phys. Plasmas. (2024) [Paper]
J. Plasma Phys. (2024) [Paper]
Nature Astron. News Article. (2024) [Article]
AIP Scilight. (2024) [Article]
The image below shows the experimental platform, and the GIFs show the current sheet evolution without and with radiative emission in simulations performed with the MHD code GORGON.
Magnetized shocks occur in both inertial confinement fusion plasmas, and in astrophysical systems, where they drive compression and heating. My simulations and experiments characterize the structure of bow shocks and oblique shocks in high Mach number plasma flows, and demonstrate the effects of radiative cooling and resistive diffusion in shocks.
Plasma Phys. (2025) [Paper]
J. Plasma. Phys. (2022) [Paper]
Rev. Sci. Instrum. (2022) [Paper]
MIT News. (2023) [Article]
The images below show some comparisons of experiments and simulations of oblique, bow, and planar shocks in magnetized plasmas.
Computational Modeling (MHD, Radiation Physics, Runaway Electrons)
• I use the extended-MHD code M3D-C1 for high-fidelity disruption modeling in MCF machines. I develop the runaway electron module in M3D-C1. [link]
• I use GORGON for radiative MHD modeling in high energy density plasmas. [link]
• I develop RESolver – a fast, 0D/1D Python code for runaway electron modeling in tokamaks. [link]
• I use DREAM for fluid-kinetic calculations of runaway and energetic electron physics. [link]
• For collisional-raditive modeling, I use PrismSPECT. My work was highlighted on the PrismSPECT website. [link]
• I develop RadTran - A 1D radiation transport solver for synthetic radiation spectrum generation. [link]
• I develop BiotSavartSolver - a verstile tool written in MATLAB for calculating magnetic fields from current paths in 3D geometry. [link]
• I also develop CANARY, which is a fast, light-weight, parallel MHD code. Below are some MHD simulations performed using CANARY. [link]
Plasma Diagnostics, Optimization, and Machine Learning
Spectroscopy analysis can be time consuming and computationally expensive for large datasets. Using machine learning, we can significanly reduce the time required to analyze spectroscopy data without a loss in prediction accuracy.
Trans. Plasma Sci. (2024) [Paper]
Commonly used plasma diagnostics, such as interferometry or self-emission imaging, provide line-integrated views of the plasma along limited lines of sight. Using tomography, we can reconstruct the 3-D structure of reconnection layers, z-pinches, MHD instabilities, and shocks.
Github. [Link]
We show that through simultaneous bow shock imaging and inductive probe measurements, velocity and temperature of the plasma can be measured using a cheap easy-to-implement diagnostic.
Rev. Sci. Instrum. [Paper]
Photonics and Optical Modeling
The properties of electromagnetic waves in magnetized plasmas can be used to design tunable metamaterials, such as plasma lenses, polarizers, and waveguides. We explore this using ray-tracing and Fourier optics.
Github. [Link]
Surface plasmon polaritons, which emerge from the oscillation of surface plasma in metals, propagate at interfaces between media, typically between a metal and a dielectric medium. SPPs excited on metal-anisotropic dielectric surfaces can have potential applications in the areas of anisotropic and angle dependent sensing, tunable surface plasmon resonance, and directional SPP or signalexcitation and propagation. This project explores anisotropic SPPs using theoretical and FDTD simulations in Lumerical.
Negative index materials can be used to create tunable photonic band gaps that are robust to randomness and defects.