The international project JOREK_P, led by our Fusion group member Dr Shimpei Futatani in close collaboration with ITER, has been awarded with computing time amongst the 84 proposals submitted in the 15th Call for PRACE Project Access. PRACE has granted the project 15.0 million core hours on MareNostrum 4 for a period of 12 months (starting October 2017).
La Vanguardia, a Spanish newspaper, has published an interview with Johannes Schwemmer, Fusion for Energy (F4E) Director. F4E is the agency in charge of managing the ITER project (Reactor International Experimental Thermonuclear) with headquarters in Barcelona, where it employs more than 400 people.
The 36th Bienal de la Real Sociedad Española de Física was held in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on the 17th-21st of July. The charming city was a perfect choice to host the Spanish physical community. Its people, gastronomy and old streets are ideal to let your imagination fly after some really interesting talks.
The conference gives an idea of the research carried out in Spain. The scope of research carried out is very broad and many fields were covered, from our research topic Plasma Physics to Nuclear physics, Thermodynamics, Energy and Sustainability, Molecular Physics, Astrophysics etc. Our PhD student Dani Gallart attended the conference and contributed with a paper entitled “Heating modelling and extrapolation of hybrid plasmas at JET”.
Machine-learning researchers at Google Research have developed in collaboration with researchers at Tri Alpha Energy a new computer algorithm which has significantly speeded up the optimization of its C-2U plasma generator.
On 25 July, the researchers published a report in the journal Scientific Reports describing the “Optometrist Algorithm” , a machine-learning tool that aids in choosing parameters to hold hotter nuclear plasma for longer periods in fusion experiments, one of the keys to cracking the complex code of nuclear fusion.
The Institute of Plasma Physics at Chinese Academy of Sciences have set a new world record in fusion by achieving 101.2 seconds in the so-called H-mode confinement regime in a fusion reactor on the 3rd of July.
The experiment was conducted on Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor at the Institute of Physical Science in Hefei, China.
The 44th European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics took place in Belfast, Northern Ireland, from the 26th to the 30th of June, 2017. It is the largest annual conference in the field organized in Europe, with more than 600 delegates each year.
This year our group members Mervi Mantsinen, Shimpei Futatani and Nathan Oliveira de Lopes participated in the conference.