On Monday August 22, the SUMTRAIC 2011 summer school opened. One of the students attending, Tom van Laer from Belgium, will report his experiences during the summer school here:

Tuesday, August 23:

The second day of the SUMTRAIC Summer School each group learned how to work with the diagnostics they are assigned to and how to process the experimental data.

In the evening there was a welcoming party with a buffet for the SUMTRAIC participants and the IPP personnel. It is very nice to get to know each other with some food and a beer. Apart from the Czech beer and wine, also other typical drinks of some of the participating countries were available to taste, like Hungarian Palinka, Belgian beer and Russian vodka.

Apparently it is also a tradition that each country represents itself with a famous  song in their national language. It’s really interesting to hear all these different languages.

Later in the evening one of the Hungarian people provided us with some guitar music and songs. Dr. Stöckel sang a few songs which are very famous in Prague and it surroundings. There was a great atmosphere and I think everybody had a great evening.

Wednesday, August 24:

On Wednesday we visited the GOLEM tokamak which was stationed at the Institute of Plasma Physics before COMPASS. After an introduction and a complete start up of the tokamak, the SUMTRAIC participants were allowed to operate the GOLEM tokamak themselves.

This was done by using an online interface to set the parameters necessary to operate the tokamak. Dr. Stöckel made it into a competition to achieve the longest plasma time, highest plasma temperature and lowest plasma resistance. Some of the results were completely useless, but a lot of the experiments were successful.