Welcome to cfspopcon’s documentation!
POPCONs (Plasma OPerating CONtours) is a tool developed to explore the performance and constraints of tokamak designs based on 0D scaling laws, model plasma kinetic profiles, and physics assumptions on the properties and behavior of the core plasma.
POPCONs was initially described in [1] where it was applied to the design of the SPARC tokamak.
Further, [1] also introduced the SPARC Primary Reference Discharge (PRD) defining the highest fusion gain achievable on SPARC.
Since that paper was released, the design point has been refined and the latest design point is now available as example_cases/SPARC_PRD, which is covered in the Getting Started guide.
A document explaining the changes between the SPARC Physics Basis and the current version are detailed in Changes-to-SPARC-PRD.pdf.
To start generating your fist plasma operating contours with cfspopcon, head over to the Getting Started guide.
A useful resource is our Physics Glossary which lists all input and output variables, including definitions and citations for formulas where relevant.
If you are interested in how to setup a development environment to make changes to cfspopcon, we suggest you checkout the Developer’s Guide.