Summer school PlasmaSurf 2015
Report by Matúš Cvengroš. Powered by FuseNet

In the late July of 2015 I had the opportunity to be part of the amazing event held in Lisbon by collaboration of Instituto Superior Técnico and Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear. This one-week summer school is meant for engineering and physics student all around the world, focusing on problems regarding thermonuclear fusion, plasmas and high power lasers.

The course consisted of classes throughout the day and many outdoor activities after. Presentations were held in a hostel right next to the beach, with some of the best presenters in these specific areas of expertise. Lectures covered many areas of thermonuclear fusion, such as tokamak devices and their composition, function principles and diagnostics. Presented were also lectures on theory of plasmas, principles of inertial fusion and laser systems, and also numerical simulations in these fields, mainly regarding the laser systems and interaction between electromagnetic radiation and plasmas. Later, experimental results of technicians and physicists from IPFN and other institutes were presented, which enriched the studies with some outstanding results.

Other than studying, PlasmaSurf was full of surprises and activities to ease people minds after the lectures, consisting of a presentation about history of Portuguese people with close-up inspection of the life of people of Lisbon, then a visit to the ISTTOK Tokamak, but also kayaking, mountaineering, swimming, hiking and surfing. Believe me, there are not many places on Earth to see a gray-haired professor kitesurfing on the waves of the North Atlantic Ocean, with the expression of a long-time veteran and a coolness beyond all bounds.

The PlasmaSurf event is simply an ideal place to meet outstanding and brilliant minds of these times, with the motivation and eagerness to solve one of the greatest challenge in the history of mankind - harvesting energy through the Stars.