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.
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.
Marta Florido and Adam Teixido, both 4th year bachelor students at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya’s CFIS programme (Centre de Formació Interdisciplinària Superior), have joined us this summer with an internship program. Both internships are part of the BSC International Summer HPC Internship Programme aims to encourage students to start a research career in our multidisciplinary research center. The Severo Ochoa award funds this Programme.
As customary in previous years, last week the 10th Edition of the PUMPS Summer School (Programming and Tuning Massively Parallel Systems) was held at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC). The course is organized by Barcelona Supercomputing Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UPC, and HiPEAC Network of Excellence. Our team member José Lorenzo had the opportunity to attend the course.