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A magnetic configuration scan was performed at Wendelstein 7-X stellarator by varying the rotational transform to analyze the plasma confinement for magnetic configurations with different edge magnetic island locations and sizes. For the magnetic configurations, where the 5/5 island chain was moved inside the last closed flux surface, it was observed with electron cyclotron emission measurements that an electron temperature, T e , pedestal develops in the plasma buildup phase and followed by the edge localized mode (ELM)-like crashes. From the mapping of the island to the plasma radius from HINT equilibrium, it was found that the T e pedestal is formed at the island location on the high field side of the plasma. The ELM-like crashes occur at the location of the pedestal and the transport barrier is broken typically with an energy loss of 3-4% during a single ELM-like event. The frequency and the amplitude of the ELM-like crashes were observed to be changing with island size, plasma heating power and density. Additionally during the plasma decay, after the heating was switched-off, a transition to degraded plasma confinement state was observed with changed T e profile gradients, faster decay rate of diamagnetic energy, and increased H-alpha levels.

In this community white paper, we describe an approach to achieving fusion which employs a hybrid of elements from the traditional magnetic and inertial fusion concepts, called magneto-inertial fusion (MIF). The status of MIF research in North America at multiple institutions is summarized including recent progress, research opportunities, and future plans.

The sentence, “It was named C/2013 A1 (at 56 km/s, 0.7 km in diameter, weighing 3 × 10 8 metric Tons, it had 4 billion megatons of kinetic energy ).” should read as.

We argue that it is essential for the fusion energy program to identify an imagination-capturing critical mission by developing a unique product which could command the marketplace. We lay out the logic that this product is a fusion rocket engine, to enable a rapid response capable of deflecting an incoming comet, to prevent its impact on the planet Earth, in defense of our population, infrastructure, and civilization. As a side benefit, deep space solar system exploration, with greater speed and orders-of-magnitude greater payload mass would also be possible.

This document is the product of a stellarator community workshop, organized by the National Stellarator Coordinating Committee and referred to as Stellcon, that was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts in February 2016, hosted by MIT. The workshop was widely advertised, and was attended by 40 scientists from 12 different institutions including national labs, universities and private industry, as well as a representative from the Department of Energy. The final section of this document describes areas of community wide consensus that were developed as a result of the discussions held at that workshop. Areas where further study would be helpful to generate a consensus path forward for the US stellarator program are also discussed. The program outlined in this document is directly responsive to many of the strategic priorities of FES as articulated in “Fusion Energy Sciences: A Ten-Year Perspective (2015–2025)” [ 1 ]. The natural disruption immunity of the stellarator directly addresses “Elimination of transient events that can be deleterious to toroidal fusion plasma confinement devices” an area of critical importance for the US fusion energy sciences enterprise over the next decade. Another critical area of research “Strengthening our partnerships with international research facilities,” is being significantly advanced on the W7-X stellarator in Germany and serves as a test-bed for development of successful international collaboration on ITER. This report also outlines how materials science as it relates to plasma and fusion sciences, another critical research area, can be carried out effectively in a stellarator. Additionally, significant advances along two of the Research Directions outlined in the report; “Burning Plasma Science: Foundations—Next-generation research capabilities”, and “Burning Plasma Science: Long pulse—Sustainment of Long-Pulse Plasma Equilibria” are proposed.

Neutrons are a unique tool to alter and diagnose material properties and excite nuclear reactions with a large field of applications. It has been stated over the last years, that there is a growing need for intense, pulsed neutron sources, either fast or moderated neutrons for the scientific community. Accelerator based spallation sources provide unprecedented neutron fluxes, but could be complemented by novel sources with higher peak brightness that are more compact. Lasers offer the prospect of generating a very compact neutron source of high peak brightness that could be linked to other facilities more easily. We present experimental results on the first short pulse laser driven neutron source powerful enough for applications in radiography. For the first time an acceleration mechanism (BOA) based on the concept of relativistic transparency has been used to generate neutrons. This mechanism not only provides much higher particle energies, but also accelerated the entire target volume, thereby circumventing the need for complicated target treatment and no longer limited to protons as an intense ion source. As a consequence we have demonstrated a new record in laser-neutron production, not only in numbers, but also in energy and directionality based on an intense deuteron beam. The beam contained, for the first time, neutrons with energies in excess of 100 MeV and showed pronounced directionality, which makes then extremely useful for a variety of applications. The results also address a larger community as it paves the way to use short pulse lasers as a neutron source. They can open up neutron research to a broad academic community including material science, biology, medicine and high energy density physics as laser systems become more easily available to universities and therefore can complement large scale facilities like reactors or particle accelerators. We believe that this has the potential to increase the user community for neutron research largely.

Research on magnetic confinement of high-temperature plasmas has the ultimate goal of harnessing nuclear fusion for the production of electricity. Although the tokamak 1 is the leading toroidal magnetic-confinement concept, it is not without shortcomings and the fusion community has therefore also pursued alternative concepts such as the stellarator. Unlike axisymmetric tokamaks, stellarators possess a three-dimensional (3D) magnetic field geometry. The availability of this additional dimension opens up an extensive configuration space for computational optimization of both the field geometry itself and the current-carrying coils that produce it. Such an optimization was undertaken in designing Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) 2 , a large helical-axis advanced stellarator (HELIAS), which began operation in 2015 at Greifswald, Germany. A major drawback of 3D magnetic field geometry, however, is that it introduces a strong temperature dependence into the stellarator’s non-turbulent ‘neoclassical’ energy transport. Indeed, such energy losses will become prohibitive in high-temperature reactor plasmas unless a strong reduction of the geometrical factor associated with this transport can be achieved; such a reduction was therefore a principal goal of the design of W7-X. In spite of the modest heating power currently available, W7-X has already been able to achieve high-temperature plasma conditions during its 2017 and 2018 experimental campaigns, producing record values of the fusion triple product for such stellarator plasmas 3 , 4 . The triple product of plasma density, ion temperature and energy confinement time is used in fusion research as a figure of merit, as it must attain a certain threshold value before net-energy-producing operation of a reactor becomes possible 1 , 5 . Here we demonstrate that such record values provide evidence for reduced neoclassical energy transport in W7-X, as the plasma profiles that produced these results could not have been obtained in stellarators lacking a comparably high level of neoclassical optimization. Previously documented record values of the fusion triple product in the stellarator Wendelstein 7-X are shown to be evidence for reduced neoclassical energy transport in this optimized device.

The two leading concepts for confining high-temperature fusion plasmas are the tokamak and the stellarator. Tokamaks are rotationally symmetric and use a large plasma current to achieve confinement, whereas stellarators are non-axisymmetric and employ three-dimensionally shaped magnetic field coils to twist the field and confine the plasma. As a result, the magnetic field of a stellarator needs to be carefully designed to minimize the collisional transport arising from poorly confined particle orbits, which would otherwise cause excessive power losses at high plasma temperatures. In addition, this type of transport leads to the appearance of a net toroidal plasma current, the so-called bootstrap current. Here, we analyse results from the first experimental campaign of the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator, showing that its magnetic-field design allows good control of bootstrap currents and collisional transport. The energy confinement time is among the best ever achieved in stellarators, both in absolute figures (τE > 100 ms) and relative to the stellarator confinement scaling. The bootstrap current responds as predicted to changes in the magnetic mirror ratio. These initial experiments confirm several theoretically predicted properties of Wendelstein 7-X plasmas, and already indicate consistency with optimization measures.

After considerable design and construction, we describe the status of a physics exploration of magnetized target fusion (MTF) that will be carried out with the first flux conserving compression of a high pressure field-reversed configuration (FRC). The upgraded Los Alamos (LANL) high density FRC experiment FRXL has demonstrated that an appropriate FRC plasma target can be created and translated on a time scale fast enough to be useful for MTF. Compression to kilovolt temperature is expected to form a Mbar pressure, high energy density laboratory plasma (HEDLP). Integrated hardware on the new Field Reversed Compression and Heating Experiment (FRCHX) at the Air Force Research Laboratory Shiva Star facility, has formed initial FRC’s and will radially compress them within a cylindrically symmetric aluminum “liner”. FRXL has shown that time scales for FRC translation to the target region are significantly shorter than the typical FRC lifetime. The hardware, diagnostics, and design rationales are presented. Pre-compression plasma formation and trapping experimental data from FRXL and FRCHX are shown.