Steven Sabbagh and Jack Berkery, Columbia University physicists on assignment to PPPL, have received the 2016 Landau-Spitzer Award for outstanding contributions to plasma physics. The biennial honor, named for Russian physicist Lev Landau and PPPL founder and Princeton astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer, recognizes outstanding research that also advances collaboration and unity between U.S. and European scientists.

The 2016 award honors experimental progress in validating understanding of the stability of resistive wall modes, a type of instability that can limit high plasma pressure, an essential ingredient for fusion reactions in tokamaks. “Our research validating kinetic resistive wall mode theory with focused experimentation and analysis has produced a significant and positive paradigm shift in understanding high-performance plasma stability,” said Sabbagh. “We want to operate tokamaks with greater stability,” concurred Berkery,“and our research has provided an understanding of how to do that.”