Physicist Dr Fatima Ebrahimi from the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has carried out first computer simulations to evaluate the efficiency of a start-up mechanism known as coaxial helicity injection (CHI), of doughnut-shaped fusion machines such as tokamaks. The approach simulated by Dr Ebrahimi could also benefit devices that use superconducting magnets.
On Thursday, May 26th, the Institute of Physics (IOP) released a campaign on Twitter to break down the stereotype of what a physicist looks like.
The objective of the movement is to help the non-scientific community to better understand that there is no mainstream physicist, and that there is a wide range of jobs a physicist can do, from finance (econophysics) to healthcare (medical physics).
Last Friday, 20 May 2016, was a historic day at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). It was a day that the $94-million upgrade to National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX-U), which took almost four years to build, was officially launched by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Ernest Moniz.
Funded by the DOE Office of Science, NSTX-U addresses how to create fusion, the process that powers the Sun, on Earth, in a device based on the spherical tokamak concept.
On May 4th – 6th, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center held the 3rd BSC International Doctoral Symposium. The opening was done by Mateo Valero, founder and director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
The Symposium, aimed mostly to PhD and Postdoc students, gave them an opportunity to show their work and understand more about the research done in different fields interrelated with High Performance Computing.
The quest for Fusion Energy has been approached through decades in different manners. Most of the contributions are done by the governmental sector, National Laboratories and Universities given that its duration is expected to be long and therefore not so well suited for normal investors.
This scenario has recently started to change with the Venture Capital, where investors are free to speculate in high-risk and high-compensation projects, as explained by BBC Future its recent article.
Using an advanced plasma global code called XGCa, researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have confronted the conventional view of the so-called bootstrap current with results clarifying the origin of the current at the tokamak edge.