Atomic and Molecular data activities at the IAEA in support of nuclear fusion energy research

The Atomic and Molecular Data (AMD) Unit of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is dedicated to the provision of databases for atomic, molecular and plasma-material interaction data that are relevant for nuclear fusion research. The modelling of plasma in experimental fusion energy reactors requires large amounts of collisional and spectroscopic data on species in a wide variety of ionization states; the projects that the AMD Unit undertakes in support of the provision of these data will be described in this presentation, including those relating to the use of neutral beams for plasma heating and diagnostics, impurity species injected into fusion plasmas to enhance confinement and mitigate instabilities, and the vapour shielding phenomenon.

The AMD Unit maintains several databases of relevant data that result from these activities, including a bibliographic database (AMBDAS), and data sets of collisional processes (ALADDIN and CollisionDB). Recent developments in the standards, data schemas and online search tools for these databases will be discussed, with particular reference to an Application Programming Interface (API) developed to facilitate the automated retrieval of collisional cross section and rate coefficient data by modelling codes. It is anticipated that these standards and databases will find use beyond the fusion plasma modelling community and methods for depositing data in CollisionDB upon its publication are in development.

Finally, a software library, written in the popular Python programming language, to aggregate, transform and compare collisional data sets will be demonstrated.

AMD Unit: https://amdis.iaea.org/

CollisionDB: https://db-amdis.org/collisiondb/