Daily Princetonian – Bending beams: Focusing ions with ceramic
Daily Princetonian – Bending beams: Focusing ions with ceramic
By Meredith Wright | 03 April 2012
Erik Gilson of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory isn’t doing anything much different from holding a magnifying glass over an ant on a hot summer day, focusing diffuse rays from the sun to fry a bug to a crisp. Replacing the glass lens with magnets and the ant with a pellet of nuclear fuel gives a rough model of the experiment that his project is trying to carry out.
Gilson is part of the Virtual National Laboratory for Heavy-Ion Fusion, a partnership between the PPPL, E.O. Lawrence Berkeley Lab and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. According to Joe Kwan, the project manager of the Berkeley Lab, the PPPL’s job is to make the plasma source; the machine itself is located in Berkeley, and the Livermore lab helps with computer simulations. HIF-VNL has existed since 1999 and is funded by the Office of Fusion Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy, with the primary goal of developing ion beams as drivers for fusion energy and heavy ion physics research.
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