The third coil in a series of High-Temperature Superconducting (HTS) coils known as ‘little big coils’ (LBC) has enabled the highest direct-current magnetic field to date at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (MagLab), United States. This last coil which barely weighs 400 grams generated a field of 14.4 T while able to retain the superconducting state in a background field of 31.1 T created by a resistive magnet, thus reaching the highest field ever registered of 45.5 T.
Following the yearly tradition established over the past seven years, the Portuguese Institute of Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion (IPFN), located in Lisbon, Portugal, organized the PlasmaSurf 2019 summer school in plasma physics, intense lasers and nuclear fusion from the 14th to the 21st of July. This year two members of our group, Jordi Manyer and Ignacio López de Arbina, were among the lucky applicants accepted to attend the school. Jordi’s participation was further sponsored by FuseNet, which we gratefully acknowledge.
The XXXVII Biennial Meeting of the Spanish Royal Society of Physics (RSEF) was held last week (15th-19th July) in Zaragoza (Spain). The conference attracted more than 500 physicists working in a broad variety of disciplines, giving an overview to many research topics and research carried out in Spain in physics.
This year, the 46th European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics (EPS2019) was held in Milan (Italy), from July 8 to 12, 2019. This annual conference is organized by the European Physical Society (EPS) Plasma Physics Division, and it covers the wide field of plasma physics from Magnetic Confinement Fusion Plasma, Beam Plasmas & Intertial Fusion, Low Temperature and Dusty Plasmas to Basic, Space & Astrophysical Plasmas. Researchers from all around the world met at this conference to show and explain their work to the growing community of plasma physicists.
On the 24th of June, our group leader Mervi Mantsinen had the honour of being one of the members of the PhD examination committee of Ivana Abramović at the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands.
High Temperature Superconductor (HTS) current leads are a key technology of the ITER magnet system, transmitting the huge currents (up to 68 kA) from the power supplies at room temperature to the low temperature superconducting coils installed in the fusion reactor. ITER’s large coils will need 60 current leads located at the end of the magnet feeders, thus operating in a lower magnetic field and reducing the heat load compared to conventional current leads. In fact, the higher cost of HTS current leads is by far compensated by the savings in the operation of the cryoplant.