Related papers: Stellarators as a Fast Path to Fusion
Most tokamak devices including ITER exploit the D-T reaction due to its high reactivity, but the wall loading caused by the associated 14MeV neutrons will limit the further development of fusion performance at high beta. To explore p-11B…
Confining energetic ions such as alpha particles is a prime concern in the design of stellarators. However, directly measuring alpha confinement through numerical simulation of guiding-center trajectories has been considered to be too…
In designing stellarators, any design decision ultimately comes with a trade-off. Improvements in particle confinement, for instance, may increase the burden on engineers to build more complex coils, and the tightening of financial…
The mass of stars is enough to confine a plasma to fuse light atoms, but this is not possible to engineer on Earth. Fortunately, nuclear engineering can rely on the magnetic confinement of a plasma using superconducting coils so long as the…
This Roadmap article addresses the critical and multifaceted challenge of plasma-facing component (PFC) damage caused by runaway electrons (REs) in tokamaks, a phenomenon that poses a significant threat to the viability and longevity of…
In the construction of a stellarator, the manufacturing and assembling of the coil system is a dominant cost. These coils need to satisfy strict engineering tolerances, and if those are not met the project could be canceled as in the case…
A common optimization problem in the areas of magnetized plasmas and fusion energy is the design of magnets to produce a given three-dimensional magnetic field distribution to high precision. When designing arrays of permanent magnets for…
Each day the world inches closer to a climate catastrophe and a sustainability revolution. To avoid the former and achieve the latter we must transform our use of energy. Surprisingly, today's growing problem is that there is too much wind…
A technique, volumetric power optimization, is presented for enhancing the power output of magnetic confinement fusion devices. Applied to a tokamak, this approach involves shifting the burning plasma region to a larger plasma volume while…
The working parameters and challenges of ultra-high-field pulsed commercial stellarator reactors of small plasma volume with breeding external to resistive coils ($transposed$ stellarator) are studied. They may allow production of…
We introduce a simple optical gate to fuse arbitrary size polarization entangled W-states to prepare larger W-states. The gate requires a polarizing beam splitter (PBS), a half wave plate (HWP) and two photon detectors. We study numerically…
An open-source database of 457 experimental and numerical entries representing 32 machines$-$including tokamaks, stellarators, and linear plasma devices$-$is assembled. From this dataset, we derive multi-machine scaling laws that predict…
Stochastic programming is widely used for energy system design optimization under uncertainty but can exponentially increase the computational complexity with the number of scenarios. Common scenario reduction techniques, like…
Proton-Boron fusion requires extreme ion temperatures and robust confinement, making Spherical Tokamaks (ST) with high-power neutral beam injection primary candidates. In these devices, strong toroidal rotation and the large mass disparity…
Combined plasma-coil optimization approaches for designing stellarators are discussed and a new method for calculating free-boundary equilibria is proposed. Four distinct categories of stellarator optimization, two of which are novel…
A spherical tokamak (ST) with a plasma center column (PCC) can be formed via driven magnetic relaxation of a screw pinch plasma. An ST-PCC could in principle eliminate many problems associated with a material center column, a key weakness…
Tokamak start-up is characterized by low electron densities and strong electric fields, in order to quickly raise the plasma current and temperature, allowing the plasma to fully ionize and magnetic flux surfaces to form. Such conditions…
Laser plasma accelerators have the potential to reduce the size of future linacs for high energy physics by more than an order of magnitude, due to their high gradient. Research is in progress at current facilities, including the BELLA…
While wind and solar power contribute to sustainability, their intermittent nature poses challenges when integrated into the grid. To mitigate these issues, renewable energy can be combined with coal fired power and hydropower sources to…
The sputtering of inside wall components of tokamaks can lead to the injection of supersaturated vapour in the plasma edge. The resulting condensation favours the formation of clusters which can give rise to solid particulates by further…