Part of the benefit is that high frequency microwaves mostly move through the device unaffected by the plasma all the way until they reach the resonance position where their energy is absorbed. Lower frequency injected waves can be deflected by plasma and stray from the intended path.

Absolutely, standard issue personal protective equipment 😀

High power microwaves are amazing. In addition to bulk heating, they can also be used to stabilize undesirable plasma modes. Detailed info on that process is published here, doi.org/10.1088/0029...

This work was featured in the 2024 Early Career Collection from Physics of Plasmas, pubs.aip.org/pop/collecti...

T. Macwan, et al., Physics of Plasmas 31, 122503 (2024), doi.org/10.1063/5.02...

T. Macwan and colleagues performed experiments at d3dfusion.org to determine the drivers for a plasma mode that regulates pressure in the far edge. When far edge pressure gets too high, fusion plasmas tend to expel large bursts of hot particles that will definitely cause wall damage in a reactor.

That is a legitimate suspicion, but this is a real research tool. AI is trained on simulation codes that take days to run on supercomputers. The AI version completes in minutes. Users interactively change the device layout and rerun the simulations to test how a new configuration would behave.

You have a valid point considering consumer applications at large scale. In this case, the AI tool is being used for research with the cost factored in to the resource assessment and the limits of applicability factored in to the research plan.

You can learn more about how the negative triangularity scenario is being advanced at DIII-D here.
Campaign highlights overview, d3dfusion.org/fy2023campai...
Publications list, d3dfusion.org/negative-tri...

Michel Laberge, Georgy Subbotin, Aleksei Zolotarev, Tom Gibbs, Sofiane Alla, Jin-Soo Kim, Amanda Niedfeldt, Steven McNamara, Richard A. Kraaijenhagen, Bibake Uppal, Tessa Van Volkenburg, Ria Meston, Daniel Velázquez, Angelica Ottaviano, David Gates, Allan Grosvenor, and Ayesha Dewan.

Additional gratitude is due to those who work hard behind the scenes, including our tireless colleagues Director Richard Buttery and Program Manager Matthew Lanctot and incredible support teams from General Atomics and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Thank you for your patience & support:

Thank you to all our industry participants; we appreciate the expertise you bring to the team and we are excited to see you deliver fusion energy!

See all the options for joining DIII-D here, d3dfusion.org/become-a-user/

With the bugs mostly worked out, we welcomed digiLab, Tokamak Energy, C42X Fusion Research, and Kyoto Fusioneering under a more efficient process. Some of our latest cohort completed the process in a single day, as Helion, Avalanche Energy, Thea Energy, and MSBAI (Techstars '20) joined the team.

We’ve gotten pretty good at making connections, hence the image selection below 😀

Thank you to our earliest partners in this approach, who were willing to help us work out the details. Our first cohort included General Fusion, Next Step Fusion, NVIDIA Omniverse, Oliphant Fusion, and FAR-TECH.

Sparks flew, and we have witnessed remarkable success in this endeavor. Thirteen different fusion energy companies have joined DIII-D through this mechanism. As the industry often says, “people are voting with their feet,” and they’re coming to DIII-D.

The plan was to engage the industry and maybe bring in a couple of organizations over the first year. Like any new relationship, DIII-D and the fusion industry needed to get to know each other before committing.