News release on the publication of PPPL's Quest magazine features achievements of the laboratory over the past year.
PPPL forges ahead with development of streaming media to provide rapid analysis of key findings of remote fusion experiments.
Physicist Amitava Bhattacharjee steps down as head of the PPPL Theory Department that he has transformed during nine years of leadership.
Creating an efficient fusion plasma in a tokamak requires a plasma with an extremely hot core but edges cool enough to protect the tokomak walls. Researchers at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility developed a solution that uses the active injection of gases to cool the edge coupled with enhanced core confinement.
The big holes in Swiss cheese help make it a tasty treat. Now, scientists at PPPL are adding tiny, Swiss-cheese-type holes to components to improve the process of bringing to Earth the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars.
PPPL develops novel X-ray crystal spectrometer to measure high energy density plasmas in the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $6.4 million in funding for U.S. scientists to carry out seven research projects at two major fusion energy facilities located in Germany and Japan.
Dan Boyer of PPPL receives DOE Early Career Award to accelerate predictive models of spherical tokamak plasmas with machine learning methods.
An intern about to start a Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) at PPPL and another University of Texas-Dallas student kicked off their summer with a friendly online chat with U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm about their plans for the summer.
Neutron stars are often gravitationally locked with another star and over time siphon off some of the other star’s outermost surfaces. Now, a scientist at PPPL has helped explain two phenomena associated with this process that have long baffled researchers.
Cooling a 150-million-degree plasma in an orderly and controllable fashion. Researchers at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility are studying a new method that uses boron-filled diamond shells to quickly cool fusion plasmas. Early experimental results and computer modeling indicate this method could avoid problems with traditional cooling approaches.
To operate successfully, ITER and future fusion energy reactors cannot allow melting of the walls of the divertor plates that remove excess heat from the plasma in a reactor. These walls are especially at risk of melting when heat is applied to narrow areas. Now, however, an extreme-scale computing analysis indicates that turbulence will reduce that risk.
Scientists at PPPL have been awarded three grants from NASA totaling over $2 million to conduct research that could help predict the potentially damaging effects of blasts of subatomic particles from the sun.
Every day, the sun ejects large amounts of a hot particle soup known as plasma toward Earth where it can disrupt telecommunications satellites and damage electrical grids. Now, scientists have made a discovery that could lead to better predictions of this space weather.
PPPL scientists have developed a type of deception to calm unruly plasma and accelerate the harvesting on Earth of fusion energy.
PPPL develops a model once thought to be impossible for delivering radio waves to heat tokamak plasmas.
Creating a fusion plasma requires deep understanding of the behavior of various isotopes of hydrogen. But plasma scientists have long been puzzled by a mysterious contradiction-- the disconnect between theoretical predictions and experimental observations of how fusion energy confinement varies with the mass of hydrogen isotopes used to fuel the plasma. A new analysis has helped unravel this mystery.
Research led by PPPL scientists provides new evidence that particles of boron, the main ingredient of Borax household cleaner, can coat internal components of doughnut-shaped plasma devices known as tokamaks and improve the efficiency of the fusion reactions.
A profile of scientific essays and a new forward to Vannevar Bush's 1945 landmark "Science The Endless Frontier," together with interviews with the authors.
New research reveals a surprising insight into the physics behind magnetic reconnection. The findings could lead to a greater ability to predict space weather.
Stellar supercomputer marks huge leap forward in the capacity of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory to address fusion development issues.
Article details report urging the U.S. to immediately invest in resolving the scientific and technical issues required to design and build a fusion-powered pilot plant
New computer simulation forecasts a surprisingly optimistic heat load for future fusion facilities designed to harvest on Earth the fusion that powers the sun and stars to generate electricity.
A team used two DOE supercomputers to complete simulations of the full-power ITER fusion device and found that the component that removes exhaust heat from ITER may be more likely to maintain its integrity than was predicted by the current trend of fusion devices.
Based on input from the fusion and plasma research community, the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee has put forth a new vision and goal. Based on decades of advances in fusion research, they propose working to launch an economically-viable pilot fusion power plant by the 2040s.
A novel computer algorithm, or set of rules, that accurately predicts the orbits of planets in the solar system could be adapted to better predict and control the behavior of the plasma that fuels fusion facilities designed to harvest on Earth the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars.
After nearly five years of fabrication and a battery of rigorous testing and troubleshooting, General Atomics (GA) has completed the first major milestone in one of the United States’ largest contributions to the ITER fusion project in France. The first module of the ITER Central Solenoid will join six others still in fabrication to make up the largest pulsed superconducting magnet in the world. The Central Solenoid will play a critical role in ITER’s mission to establish fusion as a practical, safe and nearly inexhaustible source of clean, abundant and carbon-free electricity.
PPPL scientists have created a plan using liquid lithium to keep the full force of extreme and potentially damaging heat from hitting the divertor region that will release heat from future tokamak fusion facilities.
Article describes allotment of supercomputer hours through the U.S. Department of Energy's INCITE program to enable PPPL-led team to extend its previous INCITE work into areas of critical interest for next-step fusion facilities.
Recent research on the neutron-proton (np) reaction could help us understand the age of the Earth and build less expensive nuclear power plants. The np reaction plays a role in potassium-argon dating and in the removal of neutrons from nuclear reactor cores, leading to core shutdown. In recent studies, nuclear scientists used a new neutron source to show that np reaction rates occur in ways very different from scientists’ initial expectations.
One of the great challenges in fusion tokamaks is how to keep the core of a plasma hot enough that fusion can occur while maintaining a temperature at the edge of the plasma low enough that it doesn’t melt the tokamak’s walls. This requires dissipating the heat and particles flowing towards the wall without reducing the performance of the core. Researchers recently developed a pathway to addressing this core-edge integration challenge.
A new type of rocket thruster that could take humankind to Mars and beyond has been proposed by a physicist at PPPL. The device would apply magnetic fields to cause particles of plasma to shoot out the back of a rocket and propel the craft forward.
Article describes PPPL collaborations with fusion companies TAE Technologies, Princeton Fusion Systems, and Tokamak Energy.
PPPL names main conference room for physicist Richard J. Hawryluk, a Laboratory guiding light for more than 40 years.
Article displays 12 research and development highlights published by PPPL in 2020.
Article describes PPPL work in coordination with MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a start-up spun out of MIT that is developing a unique tokamak fusion device called “SPARC.”
A quick look at recent research on development of permanent magnets to simplify design and construction of stellarator fusion facilities.
When fast-moving particles from the sun strike the Earth’s magnetic field, they set off reactions that could disrupt communications satellites and power grids. Now, PPPL scientists have learned new details of this process that could lead to better forecasting of this so-called space weather.
The most habitable region for life on Mars would have been up to several miles below its surface, likely due to subsurface melting of thick ice sheets fueled by geothermal heat, a Rutgers-led study concludes. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, may help resolve what’s known as the faint young sun paradox – a lingering key question in Mars science.
Design and construction of start of unique permanent magnet stellarator funded to begin.
Article describes PPPL's discoveries and prominent role in the 62nd American Physical Society-Department of Plasma Physics annual meeting.
Chuck Kessel leads the national Blanket and Fuel Cycle program, the national Fusion Energy Systems Studies program and the Virtual Laboratory of Technology and co-leads the Liquid-Metal Plasma-Facing Components program. He's devoted his career to ensuring commercial fusion power is a viable future option.
PPPL scientists have developed a unique program to track the zig-zagging dance of hot, charged plasma particles that fuel fusion reactions.
In new experiments at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, researchers separately measured the deposition of particles and turbulent transport in in high-confinement plasmas. The research showed that the increase is the result of electrons being transported by turbulence up a hill of plasma density.
Researchers at PPPL have gained a better understanding of a promising method for improving the confinement of superhot fusion plasma using magnetic fields.
Researchers from the DIII-D National Fusion Facility are preparing to support their colleagues at the National Spherical Tokamak Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U) at the U.S Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in a quest to develop sustained fusion energy. Under recently announced DOE funding programs, two teams at DIII-D will perform research on physics and instrumentation for NSTX-U as the facility’s staff work to restart operations late next year.
PPPL physicist Sam Cohen will receive an Edison Award for his invention with collaborators of a compact rocket engine thruster propelled by a small fusion reactor.
Profile of PPPL physicist Elena Belova, a pioneer in developing hybrid simulation codes in fusion and space plasmas, who has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Students attending the third annual graduate summer school at PPPL gathered virtually, due to travel restrictions, to get a broad overview of the field of plasma physics.
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