Members of the Columbia Fusion Research Center served as lecturers at two summer schools held at MIT from July 30 through August 8. The inaugural Mitigating Risks from Abrupt Confinement Loss (MiRACL) Summer School brought together 20 students to learn the fundamentals of plasma transients, their impacts, and mitigation strategies in fusion devices, while the 7th MIT Computational Physics School for Fusion Research (CPS-FR) welcomed more than 25 students for hands-on instruction in computational methods for fusion research.
Dr. Chris Hansen, Research Scientist and Associate Director of the Center, presented tutorials at both schools on applying the open-source Open FUSION Toolkit to fusion engineering problems. The materials used are available through the OFT tutorial collection. At MiRACL, Research Scientist Dr. Benedikt Zimmermann also delivered a lecture on the impacts of runaway electrons during tokamak disruptions and strategies for mitigating them.
The MiRACL summer school was organized by the FIRE collaborative of the same name, which aims to enable the design of fusion devices that are resilient to plasma transients, and of which Columbia is a key partner.
