Paolo Ricci

Paolo Ricci is a Full Professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), affiliated with the PHY department. He serves as Director of the Swiss Plasma Center and heads its theory group. Ricci earned his Master's degree in nuclear engineering from the Politecnico di Torino, Turin (Italy) in 2000, and conducted doctoral studies at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, focusing on kinetic simulation of magnetic reconnection in the Earth's magnetotail. He joined the EPFL Swiss Plasma Center as a EURATOM fellow in 2006 and was named Full Professor in October 2023. His research interests include numerical simulation of laboratory plasmas and plasmas for fusion, plasma turbulence and instabilities, basic plasma physics, large-scale numerical simulations, and numerical methods for plasma physics.

Paolo Ricci is a plasma physicist specializing in the study of plasma turbulence and magnetic reconnection in tokamak devices. His research focuses on the simulation and experimental observation of plasma behavior in scrape-off layers, with an emphasis on turbulence, blob generation, and kinetic neutral dynamics. Ricci has contributed to the development of the GBS code for tokamak boundary simulations and has explored the role of the lower hybrid drift instability in magnetic reconnection. His work addresses key challenges in magnetic-confinement fusion physics, including edge transport and confinement modes. Ricci's research integrates theoretical models with experimental data from facilities like the TCV tokamak.