Alcator C-Mod graduate students in control room

The Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(MIT) is a university

research center Center or centre may refer to: Mathematics *Center (geometry), the middle of an object * Center (algebra), used in various contexts ** Center (group theory) ** Center (ring theory) * Graph center, the set of all vertices of minimum eccentric ...

for the study of plasmas, fusion science and technology. It was originally founded in 1976 as the Plasma Fusion Center (PFC) at the request and with the collaboration of the

U.S. Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and energy production, the research and development of nuclear power, the military's nuclear we ...

. The original grant was for construction and operation of a

tokamak A tokamak (; ) is a device which uses a powerful magnetic field generated by external magnets to confine plasma (physics), plasma in the shape of an axially symmetrical torus. The tokamak is one of several types of magnetic confinement fusi ...

reactor Alcator A, the first in a series of small, high-field tokamaks, followed by Alcator C (1978) and

Alcator C-Mod Alcator C-Mod was a tokamak (a type of magnetically confined fusion device) that operated between 1991 and 2016 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). Notable for its high toroidal magnetic ...

(1993). MIT's most recent tokamak, Alcator C-Mod, ran from 1993 to 2016. In 2016, the project pressure reached 2.05 atmospheres—a 15 percent jump over the previous record of 1.77 atmospheres with a plasma temperature of 35 million degrees C, sustaining fusion for 2 seconds, yielding 600 trillion fusion reactions. The run involved a 5.7 tesla magnetic field. It reached this milestone on its final day of operation. In 2018, the PSFC began developing a conceptual design for the SPARC tokamak in collaboration with

Commonwealth Fusion Systems Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) is an American fusion power company founded in 2018 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after a spin-out from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Its stated goal is to build a small fusion power plant ba ...

. SPARC intends to use new

YBCO Yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO) is a family of crystalline chemical compounds that display high-temperature superconductivity; it includes the first material ever discovered to become superconductivity, superconducting above the boiling point o ...

superconducting magnet A superconducting magnet is an electromagnet made from coils of superconducting wire. They must be cooled to cryogenic temperatures during operation. In its superconducting state the wire has no electrical resistance and therefore can conduct much ...

s in order to achieve net fusion energy in a compact device.

References

External links

PSFC homepageNuclear Science and Engineering homepage
* New Record for Fusion (MIT News)
Alcator C-Mod pressure record: FAQ (PSFC News)
Plasma Science and Fusion Center Plasma physics facilities {{plasma-stub