Two major issues confronting magnetic-confinement fusion energy are enabling the walls of devices that house fusion reactions to survive bombardment by energetic particles, and improving confinement of the plasma required for the reactions. At the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), researchers have found that coating tokamak walls with lithium -- a light, silvery metal -- can lead to progress on both fronts.
Recent experiments on the Lithium Tokamak Experiment (LTX), the first facility to fully surround plasma with liquid lithium, showed that lithium coatings can produce temperatures that stay constant all the way from the hot central core of the plasma to the normally cool outer edge. The findings confirmed predictions that high edge temperatures and constant or nearly constant temperature profiles would result from the ability of lithium to keep stray plasma particles from kicking -- or recycling -- cold gas from the walls of a tokamak back into the edge of the plasma.
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