This is a talk I gave for the High Energy Density Science Association on Monday May 3rd, 2021.
The premier plasma physics event of the year, the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics Annual Meeting is now upon us. Normally this would mean jet lag, hoppy American beers, AirBnBs in dodgy parts of town and far too much cheap conference coffee.
I’ve been trying out a few new tools recently. Rocketbook is an erasable notebook you can scan with your phone, and Notion is, well, I’m not sure. It might be lots of things. I use it as a task manager, and I’ve started using it as a spreadsheet/database for grant proposals.
After a wonderful year of living in Munich and working at the Institute for Plasma Physics there, I decided to return to my first love: dense, magnetised plasmas. Since April 1st I’ve been working again as a post doc at Imperial College London, in the MAGPIE Group.
A few months ago, I saw an email asking for contributions to Fusion in Europe, the magazine produced by EuroFusion,…
This was my first visit to the ITER site to meet with our collaborators, so I thought I’d record a few impressions whilst I wait for my plane at Marseilles airport.
We’ve got a new paper out, based on some work done at MAGPIE shortly before I left. Instead of using the full one million amps to drive something using MAGPIE, we used a smaller pulsed-power device to produce a plume of plasma using a ‘plasma gun’.
After five and a half years working at Imperial College, I decided it was time for a change. I’d already applied for some positions in Paris the previous year, but was unsuccessful, and so I broadened the scope of my search and found a job at the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) near Munich in Germany.
The Aurora is one of the most beautiful phenomena in the solar system, and it is intrinsically linked to an elegant and ubiquitous process called Magnetic Reconnection.
Experiments on MAGPIE are expensive in terms of time and equipment – at best we can achieve one experiment a…