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2w ago

Scientists Solve 70-Year Stellarator Design Challenge, Advancing Fusion Energy

A new symmetry-based modeling technique accelerates magnetic confinement design by tenfold, addressing a critical bottleneck in fusion reactor development.

Image
Predicted motions of hundreds of particles in a fusion reactor. The motions predicted with the new method (orange, red) agree very closely with those predicted by Newton’s laws (blue, green), but can be calculated 10 times faster. Image credit: University of Texas at Austin.
Representative stock image of fusion reactor wall where high energy alpha particles escape from holes in the magnetic field.

Overview

  • Researchers from UT Austin, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Type One Energy developed a method to design leak-proof stellarator magnetic fields 10 times faster without sacrificing accuracy.
  • The breakthrough resolves a decades-old problem in stellarator confinement, previously hindered by computationally intensive methods or inaccurate approximations.
  • The new approach uses symmetry theory to eliminate magnetic field 'holes,' overcoming limitations of Newtonian simulations and perturbation theory.
  • This method also has applications for tokamak safety, helping identify weak spots in magnetic fields to prevent runaway electron damage.
  • The findings, published in *Physical Review Letters*, represent a significant step toward practical fusion energy and are being integrated into reactor design pipelines.