From the 10th of April to the 13th of May, one of the members of our Fusion group, Tomas Bensadon, went on a research stay to the ITER Organization (IO) Headquarters in Cadarache, France. The research stay took place as an internship, under the 2022- INTERN-SCOP06- ICRH modelling in various scenarios of the ITER Research Plan program. This internship was made possible by the BSC Mobility Program, which was awarded to Tomas Bensadon on August 2022.
The Plasma Science Fusion Centre (PFSC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hosted last summer the 3rd Computational Physics School for Fusion Research (CPS-FR) in Boston, USA.
Fusion Group members Tomas Bensadon and Adriana Ghiozzi participated in the 48th edition of the European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics. The event was held online due to continued concerns about the pandemic but featured a lively and fruitful dialogue nevertheless, with 612 attendees joining from countries both within and outside of Europe.
After two years of virtual conferences, the 9th BSC Doctoral Symposium came back as an in-person event that took place from 10 to 12 May in the campus of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain. Over the three days, numerous students and postdoc researchers presented their work on a wide range of research areas ranging from Electronic and Atomic Protein Modelling, Earth Systems services, Propulsion Technologies and Computer Architecture to HPC techniques and algorithms in Computer Science.
Last February, a press release was issued communicating that a team of European scientists from many sites and laboratories working together at the JET fusion reactor in Culham, UK, were able to produce a stable plasma with an energy output of 59MJ, the largest ever achieved at a fusion reactor and a historic deed in the road towards energy production through fusion plasmas.
To celebrate this memorable achievement, the Spanish Centre for Energetic, Environmental and Technological Research (CIEMAT) released a series of videos highlighting the role of CIEMAT and, in general, Spanish research, in the path to this accomplishment at JET.
Over the years, scientific research and advancements have been strongly tied to science communication. Although investing time and effort into developing the technical and physical knowledge that is necessary for science to progress, it is equally important to spend that same time and effort into properly communicating said progress to the non-scientific public. If this task is not taken seriously enough, we expose ourselves to the risk of misinformation spreading, leading to people taking important decisions with misleading information.