Event Info What will be this colloquium about: Fusion potentially provides a clean, safe, and long-lived source of energy, and is thus one of the great challenges of this century. Confining hot plasmas with intense magnetic fields is one promising path toward a commercially viable reactor. A major step in this direction will be reached with the ITER international project, under construction in France, and expected to start operation in the mid-30s. The seminar will introduce plasma physics and technology, with some focus on tokamaks – the most advanced magnetic configuration so far. The main results of theory, modeling, and experiments will be summarised. Alternative schemes to tokamaks will also be presented, given recent developments and initiatives in the private sector. Singapore has to get ready from the perspective of a reactor design that gets mature enough for commercial exploitation. This is why a robust program has been devised in theory and modeling at NTU, in collaboration with French laboratories. The objective is to interpret existing results, prepare future experiments, and design future reactors. This research program is based on ab initio simulations, theoretical plasma physics, and AI algorithms. Also, diagnostics are being developed to characterize fusion burning plasmas and devise control schemes. Speaker: Xavier Garbet received a PhD degree in physics from Aix-Marseille University (France) in 1988. He was hired by the French Commission on Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies (CEA) in 1988. He was later on visiting scientist at General Atomics (1994-1995) and Task Force Leader at the Joint European Torus facility (2001-2004). He is currently a Research Director at CEA and professor of physics at Nanyang Technology University since 2022. His research activity covers various aspects of fusion energy. Xavier Garbet has been awarded the Fernand Holweck Prize in 2019, and the EPS Hannes Alfvén Prize in 2022. Registration for this event has closed. |