Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) Science on Saturday

Any non-PPPL people interested in attending should see this site for more information: http://www.pppl.gov/about/visiting-pppl. The stellarator is an old concept in magnetically confined nuclear fusion which has recently received new life through advanced computer modeling. In a stellarator the magnetic field which confines the plasma, composed of charged particles, is entirely generated by an external set of electromagnetic coils. The resulting configuration avoids many of the limiting instabilities found in high performance tokamaks at the added cost of design complexity. Advances in computational systems over the past 30 years have allowed stellarators to be optimized for performance nearing, and possibly exceeding, that of modern tokamaks. This talk will highlight the physics and history of stellarator experimentation and design including examples from past, current, and future devices. The talk will be geared toward a general audience with no explicit expertise needed, just an interest in physics and fusion.