fusion tagged posts

Researchers look to machine learning to optimize the design and control of stellarators and tokamaks. Researchers are using artificial intelligence to perfect the design of the vessels surrounding the super-hot plasma, optimize heating methods and maintain stable control of the reaction for increasingly long periods. A new article explains how a researcher team used machine learning to avoid magnetic perturbations, or disruptions, which destabilize fusion plasma.

The intricate dance of atoms fusing and releasing energy has fascinated scientists for decades. Now, human ingenuity and artificial intelligence are coming together at the U.S...

The CNO energy-production mechanism in the universe is detected. An international team of about 100 scientists of the Borexino Collaboration, including particle physicist Andrea Pocar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, report in Nature this week detection of neutrinos from the sun, directly revealing for the first time that the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen (CNO) fusion-cycle is at work in our sun.

The CNO cycle is the dominant energy source powering stars heavier than the sun, but it had so far never been directly detected in any star, Pocar explains.

For much of their life, stars get energy by fusing hydrogen into helium, he adds. In stars like our sun or lighter, this mostly happens through the ‘proton-proton’ chains...

New high-temperature superconducting materials are also compatible with high magnetic fields. In fusion reactor designs, superconductors are used to generate the magnetic fields that confine the 100 million degree C plasma. While increasing magnetic field strength offers potential ways to improve reactor performance, conventional low-temperature superconductors suffer dramatic drops in current carrying ability at high magnetic fields. Now, the emergence of high-temperature superconductors that can also operate at high magnetic fields opens a new, lower-cost path to fusion energy.

A typical measure of fusion plasma performance is called “plasma beta,” which is the ratio of plasma pressure to magnetic field pressure...