Diving into the deep end

Publication date
Wednesday, 14 Oct 2015
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As a recent ANU graduate, I would highly recommend that any prospective student go there, based on the high-calibre people and the cutting-edge equipment you get to work with.

Imagine that a nuclear fusion device is an above-ground swimming pool, and piping hot plasma is the water that fills the pool right to the brim. Now work out ways that you can double the volume of water without making waves, spilling it over the edge or causing the pool’s walls to rupture.

Floundering to find answers? Two ANU graduates will give separate talks at an annual meeting of the American Physical Society later this year on how they have dived straight into solving different aspects of this tricky problem.

The device that Dr Wayne Solomon and Dr Shaun Haskey work on together through their employment at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory looks nothing like a swimming pool. It’s actually a donut-shaped magnetic bottle called a tokamak, which is housed at the DIII-D National Facility in San Diego—the largest nuclear fusion facility in the United States.

Dr Solomon and Dr Haskey, who graduated with PhDs from the Australian Plasma Fusion Research Facility at the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering 12 years apart (2002 and 2014 respectively) have both been invited by their peers to give separate talks about their research at the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics Annual Meeting in November this year. This is a high honour indeed for these young scientists, to present their work at a conference where thousands of nuclear fusion scientists from around the world will attend.  

Both of them draw on the swimming pool analogy to explain their research on the tokamak. “I have been working on a theoretical prediction that if you built the swimming pool in just the right way, you could potentially double or triple the height of the walls of the pool,” Dr Solomon explains. “As you can imagine, you could store a lot more water in there if you created a stable, higher wall. It’s early days, but I’ve been able to demonstrate that, in principle, it’s possible.”

In reality, the ‘walls’ are part of the high-temperature plasma’s force field, rather than material walls. The implications of Dr Solomon’s findings are that tokamaks could be built much smaller to store the same amount of plasma, thereby dramatically reducing the costs of producing electricity.

Dr Haskey’s PhD investigated instabilities in plasmas and he developed diagnostics to examine these phenomena, which could cause drastic energy losses. “Using the pool analogy, you have waves that can carry water (plasma in our case) over the edge of the pool, or in the worst case, you can have really big waves that potentially rupture the walls of the pool, leading to large losses. You want to keep things calm in the pool, so that you don’t lose any of your water.”

The significant achievements of this impressive pair can be traced back to the high quality of their training at ANU. “As a recent ANU graduate, I would highly recommend that any prospective student go there, based on the high-calibre people and the cutting-edge equipment you get to work with. It’s really amazing,” Dr Haskey says.

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