Pablo Rodriguez-Fernandez is a 🏷️#physicist and research scientist at the 📝MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, where he leads the MFE Integrated Modeling group. He is lead author of "Predictions of core plasma performance for the SPARC tokamak" (2020), the paper that answers the question 📝SPARC exists to settle: how much energy will come out relative to what goes in.

Integrated modeling is the discipline of chaining separate physics codes into one self-consistent prediction — turbulent transport, 📝pedestal stability, radio-frequency heating and 📝alpha heating all constrain each other, and a number produced by any one of them alone is not a forecast. Rodriguez-Fernandez's 2020 paper ran TRANSP coupled to the TGLF turbulence model and EPED pedestal predictions, with the TORIC full-wave code for 📝ion cyclotron resonance heating and the NUBEAM module for fast ions, and found 📝Q ≈ 9 attainable in standard 📝H-mode — against an empirical estimate of Q ≈ 11 and a mission threshold of Q > 2. He then checked the reduced model against nonlinear CGYRO simulations and found reasonable agreement. Every figure is a prediction: SPARC was under construction when the paper was written and has not yet produced a plasma.