I spent a few days in Stockholm (my first visit there) and will cut straight to the highlight: The Vasa. The Vasa, seen at right in its home at the Vasa Museum, was built by Sweden in the early 1600’s as the largest warship in the world. The Vasa sank during its maiden voyage in […]
Research
Making Our Fusion Reactor Better
Update, November 9, 2018: the video above highlights some of the upgrade projects. This video was shot at about the halfway point of the 11-month schedule for all engineering upgrades. Our lab, the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, has ended its experimental campaign and entered into a nearly one year period of upgrade construction. This […]
Dynamic Neutral Beam Current and Voltage Control to Improve Beam Efficacy in Tokamaks
The publication provided below is concerned with showing how we can reduce the energy of particle beams injected in tokamaks while actually improving the performance. The trick is that the reduced energy, i.e., beam voltage, must be accompanied by an increase in the beam current. This allows a larger number of lower energy particles to […]
Diary of a Graduate Thesis Experiment
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 […]
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 […]