Alcator C-Mod: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 09:18, 13 July 2021

Revision as of 18:42, 15 October 2021

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In the late 1960s, magnetic-confinement fusion research at MIT was carried out on small-scale "table-top" experiments at the Research Laboratory for Electronics and the [[Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory]]. At this time, the [[Soviet Union]] was developing a tokamak (though this was unknown in the United States), and [[Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory]] (PPPL) was developing the [[stellarator]].

[[Bruno Coppi]] was working at the [[Institute for Advanced Study]] atin [[Princeton, University]]New Jersey and was interested in the basic plasma physics problem of plasma resistivity at high values of the [[streaming parameter]], as well as the behavior of magnetically confined plasmas at very high field strengths (≥ 10 T). In 1968, Coppi attended the third [[International Atomic Energy Agency|IAEA]] International Conference on Plasma Physics and Controlled Nuclear Fusion Research at [[Novosibirsk]]. At this conference, Soviet scientists announced that they had achieved electron temperatures of over 1000 eV in a tokamak device ([[T-3 (tokamak)|T-3]]).

This same year, Coppi was named a full professor in the [[MIT Physics Department|MIT Department of Physics]]. He immediately collaborated with engineers at the [[Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory]], led by Bruce Montgomery, to design a compact (0.54 m major radius), high-field (10 T on axis) tokamak which he titled '''Alcator'''. The name is an [[Acronym and initialism|acronym]] of the Italian '''''Al'''to '''Ca'''mpo '''Tor'''o'', which means "high-field torus". With the later construction of Alcator C and then Alcator C-Mod, the original Alcator was [[retronym|retroactively renamed]] to Alcator A.