Artificial intelligence has crept into nearly every industry, and the companies building its hardware keep hunting for harder domains to flex in. The latest area runs particularly hot: the plasma inside a fusion reactor.
On Monday Brookhaven National Laboratory debuted a superconducting chip designed to help monitor fusion plasma in real time. The lab developed it with other U.S. Department of Energy facilities and the AI hardware start-up Great Sky.
Before fusion powers anything, its machines must be able to control misbehaving plasma. The chip’s makers hope their hardware can operate quickly enough to keep pace with changes in the plasma and help control them.
Such chips are destined for tokamaks, the large, doughnut-shaped machines that use magnets to hold the fusion plasma in place and that sit at the heart of many proposed fusion power plants. The extremely hot plasma fuel inside is temperamental. When it acts unexpectedly, it can cause a disruption, a sudden collapse that sheds its energy and can harm the device. “Disruptions are something that are kind of existential for tokamaks,” says Michael Churchill, a research scientist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, who worked on the project. “If we can’t figure out how to control disruptions, then we won’t have an operating tokamak.”
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