The lengthy diary that follows was originally written in 2007. Diary of a Graduate Thesis Experiment The laboratory in which I am performing my thesis work (LAPD at UCLA) is used by researchers from all over the world. Groups that are using the device for a research project receive an allotted time in which to […]
First Time Winner
Here it is, the first thing I have ever won! The frame around the bird, that is, and all I had to do was fill out a survey. The bird is displayed by my EO1 from Electric Objects. The EO1 is fundamentally a display screen, not unlike a digital photo frame, but the company adds in a […]
Controlled Streams from Mean Beams
The 58th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics (APS-DPP) is underway and I made it into my first press release! The conference sets up a Virtual Pressroom to distribute press releases about some of the really cool results that will be presented during the conference. For example, you can read […]
New Plasma Pressure Record Set by Alcator C-Mod
Exciting news came from the area of nuclear fusion energy this past week as the team from the Alcator C-Mod tokamak announced their new world record for plasma pressure. Before getting to that, please note that you can interact with the C-Mod Team during their Ask Me Anything session hosted by Reddit on Thursday, October […]
25 Years of Undergraduate Research at General Atomics
General Atomics (GA) just completed its 25th year of participation in undergraduate summer research according to a press release from General Atomics that was picked up by Engineering.com. The specific programs have changed over the years, with the present program being the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) that sees undergraduates spend ten summer weeks working on research […]
Control of Power, Torque, and Instability Drive using In-shot Variable Neutral Beam Energy in Tokamaks
The paper posted below resulted from just under three years of work at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility. The big result is that we were able to engineer a big change to the 20+ MW neutral beam system such that the beams can change their voltage during plasma shots. Lots of tokamaks use neutral beams […]