Research Areas

A commercially viable deuterium-tritium fusion device needs a blanket to shield against neutrons and produce tritium. Columbia’s research in this area is focused on extracting tritium from the blanket and modeling how conducting blanket concepts interact with plasma dynamics.

Design against off-normal events is an essential part of fusion energy research. The rapid quench of the tokamak plasma (called a 'disruption') releases a burst of energy into the reactor vessel that must be controlled. Research involves designing systems and techniques to manage this energy release in a benign manner.

Understanding the chain of events that leads to abrupt plasma terminations is a focus of Columbia tokamak research.

Spherical tokamaks are compact high-pressure fusion devices. Understanding their states of equilibrium and how stable they are is key for future energy production.

Columbia scientists combine the most promising elements of tokamak research to produce stable and powerful plasmas.  

Columbia students and staff participate in fusion design studies where they develop innovative concepts for fusion devices that satisfy physics, engineering and economic constraints.

The Open FUSION Toolkit is an open-source suite of modeling tools for engineering, analysis and education, developed and maintained at Columbia.

The goal of Columbia’s work in the fields of suppressing magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities and Avoiding Off-Normal Events (AONEs) is to provide reliable avoidance or mitigation of both core tearing modes (TMs) and edge localized modes (ELMs) to inform the design of a commercially viable fusion pilot plant (FPP). This research is organized and managed under three main thrusts, detailed below. A cross cutting effort informing all of these activities is the development of MHD stability and perturbed equilibrium modeling tools.

By utilizing more complex magnet geometries, a high temperature plasma can be confined without any internal currents.

Like the surface of the sun, the edge of tokamak plasmas are susceptible to bursty instabilities that must be controlled to interface the hot plasma to a material wall.

The project aims to accelerate commercial fusion energy development by ensuring predictive models are robust, transparent, and experimentally validated—minimizing risk and building stakeholder confidence in fusion reactor design and operation.