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 This summer, I visited General Atomics to perform experiments on the DIII-D tokamak in the beautiful San Diego. The experiments are part of my graduation project at DIFFER and the Eindhoven University of Technology, and the visit was supported financially by FuseNet.

We had a fantastic week at the Branch Institute of IPP at Greifswald. During the day, we could deepen our knowledge of plasma physics, and in the evening, we could build valuable relationships with the other students. The classes were very informative, although I already was familiar with many of the topics (for example, the basics of fusion, collisionless and collisional motion of particles in plasma), but it was useful the freshen up my knowledge.

Thanks to Fusenet I’ve been able to do part of my master thesis in two of the major scientific research centres in England.

Throughout this summer school, I have come to learn a lot about the current state of nuclear fusion in research. The program has been quite extensive, dealing with magnetic confinement mostly but also treating alternative types of fusion. At first, I was mostly interested in inertial confinement fusion and could barely explain the difference between a tokamak and a stellarator. Since Greisfwald holds one of the most promising stellarator, Wendelstein 7-X, I came to learn a lot about this topic. The professors have been very helpful and would let us ask every question we had.

Around this time last year I was in the midst of researching for my master thesis on fusion technology, keen to work on a project related to this grand effort of harnessing the energy of stars on earth. Little did I know that this September I would visit the largest stellarator device in the world, Wendelstein 7-X, and participate in the Max Planck IPP Summer University for Plasma Physics and Fusion Research taking place in Greifswald.

I have done my master thesis at “Laboratorio Nacional de Fusión” (LNF) at CIEMAT (Madrid). I was there from March to September 2022 to work on the characterization of the confinement of energetic ions in optimized stellarators under the supervision of José Luis Velasco. Even though the LNF is known to have the stellarator TJ‐II (picture bellow), I worked with W7‐X. In that way, I numerically explore the evolution of fast particles losses over a scan of different configurations of W7‐X.

Between 11.Sep.2022 and 16.Sep.2022 I attended the IPP Summer University 2022 in Greifswald, Germany. This summer university focused on fusion plasma physics and it was held and organized by the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. Students from all over Europe and also from other continents participated in this event, so it was a perfect opportunity to meet young physicists from all over the world. During these 5 days, we had a lot of lectures about fusion plasma physics.

During SUMTRAIC 2022 in Prague, after an introduction on the first day, to the Compass tokamak and the Institute of Plasma Physics, I started working on a project with a Portuguese student called Miguel. First, we worked on processing data from the EMTRAIC 2016, successfully reproducing that teams findings about the density dependence of runaway electron generation.

The aim of the event was to provide insight into various research areas in plasma physics through lectures, with particular regard to stellarator physics. In my opinion it fulfilled its purpose, I have a picture now about the open questions in theoretical and experimental fusion research.