Collaborations
PPPL engineering contributions to ITER, the international fusion experiment under construction in France, are forging ahead at the Laboratory. PPPL is responsible for the design and construction of seven diagnostic instruments that will be housed in four port plugs to detect and record data, and for the purchase of electrical equipment that will provide steady state power to buildings throughout the ITER facility.
Scientists at PPPL and General Atomics have modeled a self-organized plasma flow that could improve the stability and performance of fusion devices. The research simulates experiments performed on the DIII-D National Fusion Facility that General Atomics operates for the U.S. Department of Energy in San Diego.
The Laboratory and Princeton University have successfully completed a novel experiment for a system that, when fully developed, could prove useful in the verification of declared warheads in support of future disarmament agreements. The experiment translated a mathematical concept called “zero-knowledge proof” that is employed in cryptography — the science of disguising information — into a physical system. The aim of this system is to determine, without exposing classified information, whether objects to be dismantled are true nuclear warheads.
PPPL is principal investigator for a multi-institutional project to study plasma-material interaction on the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) in China. The three-year project will test the ability of lithium to protect the EAST walls and prevent impurities from bouncing back into the core of the plasma and halting fusion reactions.
Preventing disruptions that halt fusion reactions is a top priority of the U.S. magnetic fusion program. In pursuit of that goal, Steven Sabbagh, a senior research scientist and adjunct professor at Columbia University on long-term assignment to PPPL, heads a multi-institutional project to study ways to predict and avoid disruptions on the Korean Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) facility in South Korea. The long-pulse KSTAR produces plasmas that can last from 30 seconds to a design value of more than five minutes.
PPPL is designing a diagnostic system to provide high-resolution analysis of research conducted on the world’s most energetic laser system at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. PPPL has designed and used high-resolution diagnostics, called X-ray crystal spectrometers, for decades to study the data from the laboratory’s magnetic fusion research. The PPPL designs have been adopted by magnetic fusion labs around the world.
PPPL physicist Sam Lazerson has teamed with German scientists to confirm the remarkable accuracy of the magnetic fields produced by the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator in Greifswald, Germany. Sellarators are fusion facilities that confine plasma in twisty, 3-D magnetic fields, compared with the symmetrical 2-D fields that more widely used tokamaks create. The W7-X at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics is the most advanced stellarator in the world.
