In an unassuming building in an unassuming industrial park south of Los Angeles, nuclear physicists are smashing together rings of plasma at one million kilometers per hour, producing temperatures on the order of a hundred-million degrees Celsius.
In a suburban industrial park south of Los Angeles, researchers have taken a significant step toward mastering nuclear fusion—a process that could provide abundant, cheap, and clean energy.
May 2015 | M. Binderbauer | Physics of Plasmas | Paper
Conventional field-reversed configurations (FRCs), high-beta, prolate compact toroids embedded in poloidal magnetic fields, face notable stability and confinement concerns.
May 2015 | M. Slepchenkov | 2015 SOFE | Poster
The Electrode Test Stand is an experimental device for studying electrode physics contributing to the design of future fusion machines.
April 2015 | H. Guo | Nature Communications | Paper
Developing a stable plasma state with high-beta (ratio of plasma to magnetic pressures) is of critical importance for an economic magnetic fusion reactor.
February 2015 | H. Gota | Fusion Science and Technology | Paper
C-2 is a unique, large compact-toroid (CT) device at TAE Technologies that produces field-reversed configuration (FRC) plasmas by colliding and merging oppositely directed CTs. Significant progress has recently been made on C-2, achieving ,5 ms stable plasmas with a dramatic improvement in confinement, far beyond the prediction from the conventional FRC scaling.
February 2015 | X. Yang | AIP Conference Proceedings | Paper
Different microwave heating scenarios for the C-2 plasmas have been investigated recently with use of both the Genray ray-racing code and the IPF-FDMC full-wave code, and the study was focused on the excitation of the electron Bernstein wave (EBW) with O-mode launch.
October 30, 2014 | T. Matsumoto | APS-DPP | Poster
A collaborative research project with TAE Technologies has been started and we have developed a new compact toroid (CT) injector for the C-2 device, mainly for fueling field-reversed configurations (FRCs).
October 2014 | M. Binderbauer | APS-DPP | Presentation
The long-range mission is to develop compact reactor without toroidal field coils or a central solenoid.
October 2014 | D. Gupta | APS-DPP | Poster
Measurements of ion temperature profile and its time evolution is important for the understanding of FRC confinement and transport properties.