Researchers from United States and China have discovered an important finding that can help alter the way fusion devices function.

Andrew J. Cole, a new Assistant Professor of Applied Physics, had earlier stated that the magnetic reconnection leads to significantly large “magnetic islands” that lets heat and particles from the hot fusion core to contact cooler edge plasma. Magnetic islands puts a limit to fusion performance, and if large enough, can lead to a complete loss of plasma confinement.

The new confinement state inside a magnetic island by applying the “momentary heating propagation method” to the DIII-D plasma was discovered by Professor Katsumi Ida, Assistant professor Tatsuya Kobayashi, and the LHD experiment group, together with Professor Shigeru Inagaki at Kyushu University, have, together with Dr. T. Evans, a DIII-D senior researcher.

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