1 00:00:16,090 --> 00:00:20,730 So, Michael did a really lovely job of introducing basic concepts and fusion. 2 00:00:21,030 --> 00:00:24,030 Some of the problems we're facing with fusion. 3 00:00:24,360 --> 00:00:29,440 And I really want to think about where is he going next? How can we take it further? 4 00:00:29,460 --> 00:00:37,770 What are the devices that we're going to consider? So I hope by the end of this talk, I will at least somehow convince some of you that Stellarator, 5 00:00:37,800 --> 00:00:42,150 which I will introduce in a moment, could potentially be the future of fusion. 6 00:00:42,810 --> 00:00:49,410 Okay. So before I get started, there are obviously other different types of fusion devices. 7 00:00:49,740 --> 00:00:55,050 One being an actual component fusion, which actually we'll talk about in the last topic of the day. 8 00:00:55,650 --> 00:00:58,200 But we also have other areas of research. 9 00:00:58,260 --> 00:01:05,430 I'm putting them on the slides here just to be transparent that, you know, tokamak accelerators, etc. are not the only form of fusion. 10 00:01:05,760 --> 00:01:09,540 Other things do exist, but I'm not really gonna spend any time on these. 11 00:01:09,780 --> 00:01:12,990 I just want to point out there are other areas of active research. 12 00:01:14,040 --> 00:01:18,570 So arguably the most popularised fusion device is the Tokamak. 13 00:01:19,230 --> 00:01:22,740 Most of you probably would have heard of it. It's the one that makes it into the news. 14 00:01:22,950 --> 00:01:27,480 It's one that has a lot of fancy science results, maybe overhyped, as we've heard. 15 00:01:27,490 --> 00:01:30,810 But, you know, this is arguably the most famous fusion device. 16 00:01:31,350 --> 00:01:36,100 So a really quick recap of what a tokamak is. It's basically a doughnut. 17 00:01:36,120 --> 00:01:42,210 We say it has this as a little symmetry. I'm sure you all know what it means, but it means it's symmetric with two pi. 18 00:01:42,840 --> 00:01:51,180 So how do they work? Well, we for most modern day tokamaks, we have these capacitors in which the Tokamak is sandwiched in between. 19 00:01:51,610 --> 00:01:56,309 And we discharge a current. This current induces a toroidal electric field. 20 00:01:56,310 --> 00:01:59,970 So that's one that goes around the doughnut. So it'd be like the jam of the doughnut. 21 00:02:00,600 --> 00:02:06,809 This electric field increases the current. The current very nicely produces these colloidal magnetic fields. 22 00:02:06,810 --> 00:02:14,130 So that's like the basically the shape of those red poke at the pointer, those red circles up here. 23 00:02:14,370 --> 00:02:21,550 So this would be the colloidal clay that is generated by the current that goes through or part of it is and this is themselves confining, right? 24 00:02:21,570 --> 00:02:26,640 It keeps it in this doughnut shape. Those magnetic fields contain on our tokamak. 25 00:02:27,660 --> 00:02:33,719 So that's what I took my first very quick refresh to those we can think back to Michael talk you know and that 26 00:02:33,720 --> 00:02:40,710 has been talked about tokamaks have their own problems and they are numerous and I'm not going to get over that. 27 00:02:40,980 --> 00:02:48,000 But some real main ones that we have to consider, all one we actually need to charge them up is means they are discontinuous and use. 28 00:02:48,450 --> 00:02:56,070 This is extremely problematic when we think about you know from a commercial standpoint we don't want to be connecting discontinuous problem. 29 00:02:57,420 --> 00:03:07,040 Any second now, it will hopefully come back up. We don't want a discontinuous power supply to our national grid. 30 00:03:10,780 --> 00:03:17,020 The irony is not lost on me. You know, this is why we need stuttering. 31 00:03:18,400 --> 00:03:25,140 So, like I mentioned, they have this steroid occurrence that is actually extremely problematic. 32 00:03:25,150 --> 00:03:30,600 It wasn't mentioned too much by my uncle, but this is extremely problematic because they drive their own instabilities. 33 00:03:30,610 --> 00:03:34,510 There is a whole host of instabilities associated with this toroidal current. 34 00:03:34,900 --> 00:03:42,250 They lead to these violent outbursts that you saw on that on that video that Michael played when we had those flashes of white light, 35 00:03:42,550 --> 00:03:45,640 that was the violent disruptions, again, partly due to these. 36 00:03:46,060 --> 00:03:53,800 So that that's one problem. And the assignment problem I really want to mention is that Tokamaks have this empirically observed density limit. 37 00:03:54,100 --> 00:04:01,420 That means we hit a wall of the density that we're allowed. And for some reason that we're not entirely sure about yet, we can't go beyond this. 38 00:04:01,840 --> 00:04:08,739 And as you can imagine, that is really bad for fusion. We want high densities because then fusion is more likely to happen and the likelihood of 39 00:04:08,740 --> 00:04:13,360 a reaction actually occurring is going to be greater if we have these high densities. 40 00:04:13,810 --> 00:04:20,410 So these are some problems of tokamaks. So I'm going to propose to you an alternative that is rising, 41 00:04:20,440 --> 00:04:26,580 arguably in popularity amongst some and all people in the in the field is that that's the stellarator. 42 00:04:26,590 --> 00:04:32,740 So how can we think what is the stellarator? So the way I'm going to explain this to you is the following. 43 00:04:33,070 --> 00:04:39,550 I take my tokamak, I twist it, I stretch it, and maybe compress it in some way. 44 00:04:39,790 --> 00:04:43,210 Just kind of really moulder around and I'm going to get a stellarator. 45 00:04:43,690 --> 00:04:48,200 So what am I actually doing? What? What do I mean when I say I'm twisting, stretching, etcetera? 46 00:04:48,820 --> 00:04:53,830 Well, these purple surfaces that you see here are the flux surfaces that Michael spoke about earlier. 47 00:04:54,250 --> 00:05:00,370 We hope and pray that all particles are going to be confined, these purple surfaces. 48 00:05:01,150 --> 00:05:06,010 And the idea is they're allowed to steam along these surfaces, but we don't want them drifting off of them. 49 00:05:06,490 --> 00:05:10,600 And a tokamak, generally speaking, has these like nested surfaces. 50 00:05:10,900 --> 00:05:14,660 So the way you can think about this is if you think about one of the Russian dolls. 51 00:05:14,920 --> 00:05:20,200 But we have one is the other side. The other is like the other. We hope that we have these kind of purple surfaces. 52 00:05:20,200 --> 00:05:24,489 One is like the other is like the other. And I'm going to take each of my purple surfaces. 53 00:05:24,490 --> 00:05:31,360 I'm going to twist it in some funky way, and I'm going to get some crazy geometry that has no is no longer acce symmetric. 54 00:05:32,020 --> 00:05:36,280 So one thing I really want to draw your attention to here, because it's going to come up later in the talk. 55 00:05:36,720 --> 00:05:40,930 You know, it is, you know, tokamak nice and symmetric. It has this by symmetry. 56 00:05:41,260 --> 00:05:44,530 And look how simple the shape is. It looks nice, right? 57 00:05:45,040 --> 00:05:48,850 The stellarator. Now the hand has this very nontrivial geometry. 58 00:05:49,270 --> 00:05:53,200 And as such, the coils that can go around the outside have to match. 59 00:05:53,200 --> 00:05:56,620 This complicated geometry has to recreate these magnetic surfaces. 60 00:05:56,890 --> 00:06:04,630 So they are just going to be more complicated and it's not as trivial a problem to create the shape in a stellarator as it is in a tokamak. 61 00:06:05,740 --> 00:06:11,500 So that's my vague introduction to what a stellarator is. I hope it gives you some kind of a feel for what they look like. 62 00:06:12,790 --> 00:06:14,259 But you know, as you can imagine, 63 00:06:14,260 --> 00:06:20,470 I can't just twist my device in whatever way I want and expect to get a fusion reaction that's going to work perfectly. 64 00:06:20,500 --> 00:06:23,710 You can just imagine that not everything is going to work. 65 00:06:23,890 --> 00:06:27,760 So we have to ask ourselves, what devices are we actually allowed? 66 00:06:28,240 --> 00:06:34,600 So Michael spoke about in his talk very kindly leading up to mine that we have these regions of good and bad curvature. 67 00:06:34,900 --> 00:06:41,110 So on the bad curvature region, this is where those instabilities all unstable. 68 00:06:41,380 --> 00:06:43,870 They grow in amplitude. This is really problematic. 69 00:06:44,230 --> 00:06:52,570 But on the good curvature region, we have, you know, stability, the amplitudes of turbulence, the suppressed, etc. we like that side. 70 00:06:53,170 --> 00:06:58,990 So the tokamaks, the way that they deal with the fact that we have turbulence, etc., as Michael very kindly explained earlier, 71 00:06:59,350 --> 00:07:04,780 was they take stuff from the outside where it's unstable and these are all the way to the inside where it's stable. 72 00:07:05,110 --> 00:07:11,310 And the jargon within the fusion community to describe this is something called the safety factor, which I put up here. 73 00:07:11,320 --> 00:07:17,229 It's called Q for some unknown reason, and it's just basically telling us the number of toroidal turns. 74 00:07:17,230 --> 00:07:23,799 So the number of times we go down way along the doughnut bars, over the number of colloidal terms, 75 00:07:23,800 --> 00:07:31,030 which is the number of times we go the short way around the doughnut. And for tokamaks, generally speaking, we want this to be greater than one. 76 00:07:31,210 --> 00:07:37,330 And the reason we want this is because then the particles will on average see good curvature. 77 00:07:37,750 --> 00:07:41,050 You know, overall they will those perturbations will be stable. 78 00:07:41,860 --> 00:07:44,920 So that's what we do for Tokamaks. You know, I care about Stellar. 79 00:07:45,100 --> 00:07:49,089 So what do I do to celebrate as well? You know, the not actually symmetric. 80 00:07:49,090 --> 00:07:53,050 And so it's not as trivial as it is in the Tokamak. 81 00:07:53,380 --> 00:07:59,830 We don't necessarily have an intuitive feel of what the good and bad curvatures are in the stellarator. 82 00:08:00,730 --> 00:08:04,930 So we have to be more intelligent. We have to think a bit more. 83 00:08:05,050 --> 00:08:09,250 And I was very proud of this shape. But we have to think outside the non actually symmetric. 84 00:08:11,940 --> 00:08:14,459 And I will tell you, I laughed at this when I came up with it. 85 00:08:14,460 --> 00:08:22,330 Say, well, let me say before I even decide what I'm not allowed to like, before I tell you what I am and what I want for my salary. 86 00:08:22,740 --> 00:08:25,890 We have to think what are excluded? What are we not allowed to do? 87 00:08:26,310 --> 00:08:30,230 So in order to think, well, I can't have, I need to know what I'm worried about. 88 00:08:30,240 --> 00:08:34,800 Right. So there are two main problems that I want to talk about today that we have to be very worried about. 89 00:08:35,220 --> 00:08:40,140 So they are magnetic drift and this thing could be a classical transport, which hasn't been introduced yet. 90 00:08:40,140 --> 00:08:43,770 But I will introduce you to it in a minute. So the first one. 91 00:08:45,180 --> 00:08:51,270 Is magnetic dressed again, Michael, very kindly, almost leading up to this presentation like it was planned. 92 00:08:52,020 --> 00:08:58,170 Introduce the magnetic dress earlier. So the first one just to highlight here, something Michael sticks out is the equals B dressed. 93 00:08:58,560 --> 00:09:05,460 And this is purely a dress that acts radially and it's a result of the fact we have electric and magnetic fields in all systems. 94 00:09:06,090 --> 00:09:10,590 We have that rugby dress that Michael spoke about earlier where we have these 95 00:09:10,590 --> 00:09:14,250 dress that are occurring purely as a result of a magnetic field gradient. 96 00:09:14,610 --> 00:09:16,860 And again, just to remind you back to Michael's talk, 97 00:09:17,250 --> 00:09:22,860 this is occurring because where there is a weaker magnetic field, it's a lot bigger and stronger magnetic field. 98 00:09:22,860 --> 00:09:26,990 The normal weight is a smaller. And again, this means that these dress out of our device. 99 00:09:27,510 --> 00:09:29,760 But there's one additional thing that we need to consider, 100 00:09:29,760 --> 00:09:35,760 and this is very inventively called the curvature dress, and it arises because of curvature. 101 00:09:36,360 --> 00:09:40,799 And so the way you can think about this is the particles are streaming along and they 102 00:09:40,800 --> 00:09:46,650 experience some kind of fictitious centrifugal force outwards purely as a result of curvature. 103 00:09:47,370 --> 00:09:54,150 So these are something that we need to contend with, something we need to be aware of these these little losses in our devices. 104 00:09:54,990 --> 00:09:57,990 The other thing I want to introduce here is an external transport. 105 00:09:58,230 --> 00:10:02,190 So let's take a moment to think about what this actually is. 106 00:10:02,580 --> 00:10:07,620 So on the board here, I have a schematic of the magnetic field, all the talk of that. 107 00:10:08,010 --> 00:10:12,540 So it's quite a crude schematic. So please forgive me slightly, but the general just isn't here. 108 00:10:12,930 --> 00:10:17,130 So we have the magnetic field as a function of along the field line. 109 00:10:17,430 --> 00:10:21,180 So we have regions where the magnetic field is stronger and this is going to correspond 110 00:10:21,210 --> 00:10:24,990 to that good curvature region which is on the inside of our torque network. 111 00:10:24,990 --> 00:10:26,160 Magnetic field is stronger. 112 00:10:26,760 --> 00:10:32,690 We have this region of bad curvature which is corresponding to the outside of our device, whether magnetic field is weaker. 113 00:10:33,980 --> 00:10:36,950 So I'm now going to invite you to consider some different particles. 114 00:10:37,610 --> 00:10:42,650 So let's start off with a particle that has enough energy to sample the entire magnetic field. 115 00:10:43,040 --> 00:10:47,330 I'm kind of representing this as a red line on the field line. 116 00:10:47,660 --> 00:10:51,290 However, I know energy and field are not quite like this as a square. 117 00:10:52,340 --> 00:10:57,050 But generally speaking, imagine my particle has enough energy to sample anything on the field line. 118 00:10:57,830 --> 00:11:01,850 Well, as you can imagine, it's just going to stream all the way around my device. 119 00:11:01,880 --> 00:11:06,260 It's going to go along the field line almost as if it was never impeded. 120 00:11:06,660 --> 00:11:11,250 It'll just keep going. Okay. But obviously not enough. 121 00:11:11,280 --> 00:11:15,140 Nothing's ever that simple. So we might have a different type of particle, right? 122 00:11:15,560 --> 00:11:21,020 Let's now consider a particle that only has enough energy to sample some of the magnetic field. 123 00:11:22,160 --> 00:11:28,730 Well, in this case, it doesn't have enough energy to go to the good character regions or beyond sitting in a steaming round. 124 00:11:29,090 --> 00:11:34,940 Instead, it gets trapped inside, basically a potential well, and it's just going to bounce back and forth, back and forth. 125 00:11:34,970 --> 00:11:39,440 And it's going to be confined to, mostly speaking, the Bad Cabbage region. 126 00:11:40,670 --> 00:11:44,990 So this introduces two different types of particle trajectories. 127 00:11:45,230 --> 00:11:51,800 So the first to do with the particle that can sample the entire magnetic field is called passing particles. 128 00:11:52,040 --> 00:12:01,160 So this flat surface here is a flat surface, as I spoke about earlier, and I've only just taken a cut in my in my tokamak to look at it. 129 00:12:01,520 --> 00:12:05,540 But they would just go all the way around. They have no problem. They can just do the entire thing. 130 00:12:06,230 --> 00:12:13,549 The other ones, the trap particles, which don't have enough energy to sample the whole thing, are going to bounce within this magnetic. 131 00:12:13,550 --> 00:12:16,340 Well, right. I'm going to go back and forth and back and forth. 132 00:12:17,410 --> 00:12:24,970 And if this is kind of when the classical starts coming in as we talk about these orbits and how they relate to collisions. 133 00:12:25,390 --> 00:12:30,280 So collisions tend to enhance these types of stress of these orbits. 134 00:12:30,580 --> 00:12:33,430 And that is, generally speaking, what we call neo classical transport. 135 00:12:33,850 --> 00:12:40,329 It's not entirely important for this talk to really fully understand every detail of the classical transport. 136 00:12:40,330 --> 00:12:43,090 But I really want to give you an overview of what it's talking about. 137 00:12:43,570 --> 00:12:49,479 So these drifts outwards will cause electric fields, these clothes again in the perturbations, etcetera, etcetera. 138 00:12:49,480 --> 00:12:53,650 And we end up finding that there is more transport because of these types of orbits. 139 00:12:54,430 --> 00:12:59,589 And just so you can see what these really look like on the on the left here, 140 00:12:59,590 --> 00:13:06,160 I have the passing particles and you can see the black lines are giving us particle trajectories and they just go all the way round. 141 00:13:06,280 --> 00:13:15,250 They have no problem. They're very happy. On the right here, I have my trap particles and again, the black lines that are showing us the trajectories. 142 00:13:15,700 --> 00:13:20,440 And you see, they kind of bounce back and forth and they never make it to this blue side at the top of that. 143 00:13:20,920 --> 00:13:25,480 So this is just how they would look in our device. So this is passing trap particles. 144 00:13:26,490 --> 00:13:31,320 Okay. So now let's have a look at a schematic for Stellarator magnetic field. 145 00:13:32,040 --> 00:13:36,110 So you can see it looks very similar to a tokamak shape. 146 00:13:36,930 --> 00:13:41,169 It's got this same kind of like oval arching structure, but on top of it, 147 00:13:41,170 --> 00:13:46,530 it has these like little undulations on it, and that's arising because of the geometry of our device. 148 00:13:47,070 --> 00:13:50,370 So now when we think about all types of particles. 149 00:13:50,790 --> 00:13:56,070 Well, the first is all passing particles again. They have no problem making sample the entire magnetic field. 150 00:13:56,430 --> 00:14:05,310 This is fine. But the particles, because of these more complicated geometries, they have the potential to get trapped in these small wells as well. 151 00:14:05,850 --> 00:14:10,799 And so I just kind of want to show you a video quickly of what this kind of looks like. 152 00:14:10,800 --> 00:14:16,680 So this is a device that is not optimal. So the red lines are showing the particle factories. 153 00:14:16,680 --> 00:14:20,219 And currently we're looking at the passing particles. 154 00:14:20,220 --> 00:14:24,000 As you see, they don't really have much of a problem. They stick to our device quite nicely. 155 00:14:24,090 --> 00:14:29,670 They're not really the big concern here, but these trap particles as we're about to see. 156 00:14:31,480 --> 00:14:35,470 They start off on our socks off so that they start off being quite happy. 157 00:14:35,800 --> 00:14:40,660 You'll see they very quickly drift radially out of out of the flux office. 158 00:14:41,050 --> 00:14:44,170 This is problematic. This is leading to losses in our device. 159 00:14:44,170 --> 00:14:47,700 It's poor confinement in general. This is not good. This isn't what we want. 160 00:14:48,460 --> 00:14:54,910 So this is a non optimised thing. You can see this type of problem is now arising and it's obviously going to be more 161 00:14:54,910 --> 00:15:00,490 complicated in a device like a stellarator because the geometry is more complicated. 162 00:15:01,000 --> 00:15:09,940 Okay. So you just quickly summarise neo classical transport is this interaction between collisions and geometry. 163 00:15:10,540 --> 00:15:15,190 And honestly, we have very little control over this part of our equation. 164 00:15:15,310 --> 00:15:21,130 I mean, it's a very crude equation, but we have very little control over I can't tell my particles how to collide. 165 00:15:22,610 --> 00:15:26,540 Alex, you might not disagree with me, but I can't tell my pocket, Clyde. 166 00:15:26,570 --> 00:15:34,220 I can't tell them how to interact. Well, what I do have a lot of control over, especially for stellar eaters, is the geometry. 167 00:15:34,550 --> 00:15:39,470 So that's what I'm really going to say to something. So, you know, I've told you, these are my problems. 168 00:15:39,710 --> 00:15:44,220 What do I demand in order for these things not to actually be a problem within my salary? 169 00:15:44,900 --> 00:15:49,100 So you can maybe just think hard for 5 minutes and you might come up with the idea. 170 00:15:49,610 --> 00:15:53,840 As Michael kind of alluded to earlier, we want these average drifts to go to zero. 171 00:15:54,320 --> 00:15:58,160 That means that as my particle goes around the device, in theory, 172 00:15:58,160 --> 00:16:02,059 it would be following its field line and at some point it might draw out away 173 00:16:02,060 --> 00:16:06,469 from my device and other points on sort of mind in the good character region. 174 00:16:06,470 --> 00:16:11,480 It might drift back onto the field line overall during its entire order. 175 00:16:11,510 --> 00:16:19,550 I want that radio address to go to zero. So basically, I want those things to not leave the magnetic surface on average. 176 00:16:19,580 --> 00:16:25,490 That is the general gist of what I want. You might think that's nice and obvious, which if you think hard, it might happen. 177 00:16:26,210 --> 00:16:33,770 Sadly, I didn't come up with it. And I'm sure you all remember from your physics undergrad that we absolutely love symmetries in physics. 178 00:16:34,130 --> 00:16:35,480 Whenever there's a symmetry, 179 00:16:35,780 --> 00:16:42,590 we normally have some kind of concept of quantity associated with it and the symmetry associated with these types of things. 180 00:16:43,610 --> 00:16:47,360 I'm going to focus on in this talk anyway something called quasi symmetry. 181 00:16:47,870 --> 00:16:54,560 It is a subset of a wider part, a wider group of symmetries, but it's one that I'm really just going to focus on today. 182 00:16:55,130 --> 00:17:01,100 And so for these symmetries, I'm saying that, B, have a continuous symmetry in the sun quarter system. 183 00:17:01,610 --> 00:17:09,260 And if my device is quasi symmetric, it means that these radio dressing are going to average to zero, which is exactly what I want from my device. 184 00:17:10,100 --> 00:17:15,799 So this is going to be something I'm going to focus on. So what do I mean when I say the causes metric? 185 00:17:15,800 --> 00:17:22,010 I told you this complicated thing that, you know, in the sun coordinate system, etc., etc., but what am I actually telling me? 186 00:17:22,460 --> 00:17:29,960 It means that if I take my I stellarator here, which arguably has very complicated geometry compared to our nice simple tokamak, 187 00:17:30,350 --> 00:17:33,920 I take a little cut down one of the sentence. I'm going to cut it about here. 188 00:17:34,370 --> 00:17:39,470 I'm going to unfold it. Unwrap it. I'm going to apply my coordinate transformation. 189 00:17:40,040 --> 00:17:45,230 I'm going to get something that looks like this. So would you believe that these two are the same regardless? 190 00:17:45,240 --> 00:17:54,470 They are. But the idea is, if I have a particle streaming along here, if my device is quasi symmetric, I can make one of these transformations. 191 00:17:54,770 --> 00:18:02,390 And my particle wouldn't know. It's not in an axis symmetric system, so it doesn't know that it's not a tokamak under this coordinate transformation. 192 00:18:03,410 --> 00:18:08,059 And so this is how we get these types of symmetries. You know, there's been a lot of work into it. 193 00:18:08,060 --> 00:18:13,430 And I feel like it's slightly more understood these days that this is what we require for confinement. 194 00:18:14,140 --> 00:18:20,510 And just to show you that this isn't kind of something that people have, scratch their heads over and actually had applications. 195 00:18:20,840 --> 00:18:26,059 These are some quasi symmetric devices that exist, like some of them have actually been built. 196 00:18:26,060 --> 00:18:29,810 So w seven max have been built in Germany is one that I would focus on today. 197 00:18:30,110 --> 00:18:33,260 You know, some of these devices exist in the real world and have gone on. 198 00:18:33,560 --> 00:18:35,850 So this is a real advancement for theory, right? 199 00:18:35,870 --> 00:18:42,830 We made these predictions, made these gluons on our symmetries, and we came up with shapes that are allowed for our stellarator. 200 00:18:44,000 --> 00:18:49,040 Okay. So I've told you the demands. I told you the symmetries that I require for my stellarator. 201 00:18:49,370 --> 00:18:52,550 But I guess why do we want stellarator anyway? 202 00:18:53,060 --> 00:18:57,240 Tokamaks are more favourable, you might ask. Surely them will save for a reason. 203 00:18:57,770 --> 00:19:00,530 And to. To explain to you why I think we won't celebrate. 204 00:19:00,770 --> 00:19:08,660 I think it's important to understand this kind of rat race between tokamaks and celebrate is so a little bit of a history of stellarator. 205 00:19:09,710 --> 00:19:15,470 They actually were conceptualised by Spitzer in 1951, before the Tokamak was. 206 00:19:15,710 --> 00:19:18,760 So people thought accelerators were going to work us. 207 00:19:19,220 --> 00:19:23,209 And there was kind of a funny anecdote that Spitzer was on. 208 00:19:23,210 --> 00:19:30,500 It was skiing. He was on a ski lift. And between the time of the bottom and the top of the ski lift, he had completely outgrew Tokamaks. 209 00:19:30,500 --> 00:19:34,600 He had decided they weren't going to work and it was due to this toroidal current that they have. 210 00:19:34,610 --> 00:19:40,980 He said that too unstable. They're not going to work. And so the initial influx of interest was actually accelerated. 211 00:19:41,160 --> 00:19:47,069 So this is Spitzer himself with the first stellarator, and I really want to highlight the size of this thing. 212 00:19:47,070 --> 00:19:55,740 It would probably fit happily on this table, but following this, there was actually an influx of interest in Stellarator. 213 00:19:56,550 --> 00:20:00,990 And, you know, they didn't want to don that. That's just another story. 214 00:20:02,070 --> 00:20:10,799 But following that introduction, the Soviet Union in 1968 unveiled to the world the Tokamak, and it was just superior. 215 00:20:10,800 --> 00:20:14,370 It had better confinement, had better fusion properties in general. 216 00:20:14,370 --> 00:20:18,540 It was just far better than one of these tabletop devices. 217 00:20:18,540 --> 00:20:22,110 And that's because this was extremely lossy. It didn't have good confinement. 218 00:20:22,410 --> 00:20:27,059 So the Tokamak took over. And you might ask, okay, great. 219 00:20:27,060 --> 00:20:31,080 So they both existed. Why? Why did Tokamaks fly off the shelf? 220 00:20:31,440 --> 00:20:34,860 Why did everyone pick up Tokamak Research and not continue with both? 221 00:20:35,520 --> 00:20:38,550 And I think it's nicely encapsulated by the statement. 222 00:20:39,060 --> 00:20:45,000 I try to avoid hard work when things that complicated, that is often a sign that there is a better way to do it. 223 00:20:46,290 --> 00:20:50,730 And I think if you ask anyone who was with me, I live my life by this philosophy. 224 00:20:51,390 --> 00:20:58,350 So I mean, if we're being completely honest, it stellarator is initially they were neoclassical dominated. 225 00:20:58,350 --> 00:21:05,070 So those programs that I told you about mean classical transport that was a real problem to solve is so that was problematic. 226 00:21:05,340 --> 00:21:09,629 The Soviet Union tokamaks that were unveiled to the world which are superior. 227 00:21:09,630 --> 00:21:12,840 Like I said, they had better confinement, better fusion properties in general. 228 00:21:13,080 --> 00:21:18,570 They looked like they were going to work better. But I think one thing is just that they were objectively simpler. 229 00:21:18,660 --> 00:21:22,379 You know, they looked more attractive to both engineers, to physicists. 230 00:21:22,380 --> 00:21:27,720 We feel like we can approach the more they are just objectively simpler, and I think that makes them more attractive. 231 00:21:29,050 --> 00:21:39,400 But you know, with numerical developments with other people at Oxford, we have been able to really make advancements in stellarator physics. 232 00:21:39,790 --> 00:21:44,800 So we're now actually able to optimise for that new classical transport that I spoke about earlier. 233 00:21:45,190 --> 00:21:49,750 So this isn't just something I'm saying we can do, it's something that has been done. 234 00:21:50,260 --> 00:21:58,510 So there exist accelerator, like I mentioned, in Rice out in Germany, could find signs of an X or w7x for sure. 235 00:21:59,050 --> 00:22:02,680 And this was the conceptual shape that you can see. It's very complicated. 236 00:22:03,100 --> 00:22:08,560 The yellow is the magnetic field or the magnetic flux axis, and these blue, 237 00:22:08,860 --> 00:22:13,510 horrible squiggly things are the coils that are required to produce that surface. 238 00:22:13,750 --> 00:22:22,390 Please note just how horrible they are. It is non-trivial and it is much more complicated than the lovely tokamak which has this beautiful symmetry. 239 00:22:23,320 --> 00:22:26,590 But, you know, these things do exist. This was the concept of it. 240 00:22:27,530 --> 00:22:29,060 This was the construction of it. 241 00:22:29,630 --> 00:22:38,330 Notice not only how big these things are, as I'm sure Michael kind of hammered home earlier, but notice how complicated the shape is. 242 00:22:38,330 --> 00:22:44,149 It's not nice. It's not. And this at each point in our stellarator as we go around, this will change. 243 00:22:44,150 --> 00:22:48,170 Shape is not going to be the same here as it is here or here now. 244 00:22:48,170 --> 00:22:52,550 It changes shape as we go around the device. It looks messy. 245 00:22:52,940 --> 00:22:59,509 But, you know, physicists like continued, they had, you know, was the iron. 246 00:22:59,510 --> 00:23:03,770 Well, they continued forward and we actually have built their designs overnight. 247 00:23:03,770 --> 00:23:11,989 So I say we as if I had anything to do with it, but we built out Windows seven X, it exists, it's now in operation and it is producing results. 248 00:23:11,990 --> 00:23:15,290 We experiment on it. You know, it is a device that now exists. 249 00:23:15,290 --> 00:23:20,450 And this is a real triumph of theory because we have been able to optimise in the classical transport. 250 00:23:21,860 --> 00:23:27,590 Okay. So this is just the mall side by side. Although from inception to completion and now it exists. 251 00:23:28,100 --> 00:23:34,310 Okay, so what I would want to evaluate, you might say, right, how are they any better than Tokamaks? 252 00:23:34,550 --> 00:23:38,060 Well, one thing is that they are driven by these external coils. 253 00:23:38,480 --> 00:23:41,719 That's great, because we can now have continuous operation. You remember that? 254 00:23:41,720 --> 00:23:45,320 I told you that tokamaks are discontinuous and these we don't have that problem 255 00:23:45,320 --> 00:23:48,690 to celebrate because we can completely drive them by these external current. 256 00:23:48,800 --> 00:23:55,940 The external coils which are driven by currents with more improvements in materials, we can use superconducting coils. 257 00:23:56,270 --> 00:24:02,540 This is great for power output. It reduces the power we need to drive these devices. 258 00:24:03,320 --> 00:24:09,050 They don't have this toroidal current or at least we can design them to not have these two little currents. 259 00:24:09,670 --> 00:24:16,910 You know, I told you that this was a real problem for Tokamaks because it draws a whole load of instabilities and some major disruptions. 260 00:24:17,270 --> 00:24:25,239 But Stellarator is we can avoid that completely. That's very. They have an empirically observed high density limit than Tokamaks I told you before, 261 00:24:25,240 --> 00:24:30,670 the Tokamaks have this wall of density that we don't really understand, but we can't go beyond it. 262 00:24:31,360 --> 00:24:35,679 We don't seem to have such a rule in Saturday celebrations that there will be problems that we 263 00:24:35,680 --> 00:24:40,450 don't seem to have such work and currently tokamaks are not producing good enough confinement. 264 00:24:40,480 --> 00:24:47,320 We had arguments earlier that they're not doing great and there is the potential the STELLARATOR could fill that gap. 265 00:24:48,170 --> 00:24:51,700 Well, you know, I'm telling you, kind of a beautiful picture of salary. 266 00:24:51,780 --> 00:24:58,380 Is that going to fix all of our problems? But as you expect to get anything for every single advantage that we have, we are at a disadvantage. 267 00:25:00,520 --> 00:25:04,490 So you know, stellarator, they do have more complicated geometries. 268 00:25:04,600 --> 00:25:09,640 I cannot hide that this is not a super attractive feature in terms of engineering, etc. 269 00:25:10,120 --> 00:25:14,140 They are they are just complicated. That is something we just kind of have to deal with. 270 00:25:14,800 --> 00:25:17,890 They, you know, they don't have these self-generated currents. 271 00:25:17,890 --> 00:25:20,560 And although I've been telling you how problematic these currents are, 272 00:25:20,800 --> 00:25:25,660 there are people within the community who actually think these these currents could be helpful. 273 00:25:26,080 --> 00:25:32,950 They they generate this colloidal carrot of this field that goes round the short way around tokamak, which is self confining. 274 00:25:33,430 --> 00:25:36,850 At the moment, it's only 10 to 20%. That actually helps. 275 00:25:37,210 --> 00:25:40,710 But some people really want to take advantage of this. They want to see if they can push it further. 276 00:25:41,060 --> 00:25:45,820 Now, that could potentially be a problem or at least a disadvantage compared to Tokamaks. 277 00:25:46,850 --> 00:25:49,680 They have these big radios. We don't know if that's going to be a problem. 278 00:25:49,710 --> 00:25:54,620 The accelerators are comparatively feeling kind of new in terms of how much we understand them. 279 00:25:54,770 --> 00:25:57,800 That's still to be worked on that. 280 00:25:58,400 --> 00:26:03,379 And then the final disadvantage accelerators, which up until now are really shoved under the rug. 281 00:26:03,380 --> 00:26:08,970 And I didn't want to mention it because it is a very embarrassing point for those of us who like elevators, 282 00:26:09,210 --> 00:26:12,440 is that we're not actually guaranteed to have these massive accesses. 283 00:26:12,830 --> 00:26:16,940 So, Topamax, I told you we had these kind of like Russian dolls of magnetic surfaces. 284 00:26:17,420 --> 00:26:23,030 We can't guarantee this the stuttering, because we can say that we can we can demand that we have at least one, 285 00:26:23,360 --> 00:26:28,160 maybe a couple, but there's no 100% guarantee that we can have these nice nested fluxes. 286 00:26:28,680 --> 00:26:32,180 You know, we do need to be cautious of that. Okay. 287 00:26:32,870 --> 00:26:38,109 So there seems to be as many disadvantages as I have for advantages over salary. 288 00:26:38,110 --> 00:26:43,610 It isn't. All right. I'm telling you that every thing I say that's good about a salary in the same breath. 289 00:26:43,610 --> 00:26:49,580 I'm telling you the bad things about them. And you may be very well inclined to think that this is the slowest race in humanity. 290 00:26:50,000 --> 00:26:55,250 You know, we first conceptualised harnessing the power of the sun 100 days ago. 291 00:26:55,520 --> 00:27:01,580 That was when it was first thought that maybe we could produce seasonal math to try and produce energy in the same way the Sun does. 292 00:27:01,940 --> 00:27:07,669 The first Stellarator was thought of and built about 70 years ago and 70 years on, 293 00:27:07,670 --> 00:27:13,490 we are probably no farther than the Tokamak is in terms of our advancements when facing similar problems. 294 00:27:13,970 --> 00:27:19,700 And you'd be very right to think this is a very silly race that who is winning is tortoise versus tortoise. 295 00:27:21,050 --> 00:27:25,250 But, you know, whenever we have problems, physicists have said save the day. 296 00:27:27,440 --> 00:27:30,740 And so we like to think of ourselves as superheroes from time to time. 297 00:27:31,370 --> 00:27:33,889 So, you know, I've told you that there are many problems, 298 00:27:33,890 --> 00:27:40,880 that these are ongoing active areas of research in which people are making some serious leaps in different areas. 299 00:27:41,150 --> 00:27:48,740 So I repeat, if you mess with me, not to mention that we are making new strides and understand the physics of these problems and also that 300 00:27:48,770 --> 00:27:53,390 a lot of people dedicate a lot of time to understanding fundamentals to understand the instabilities. 301 00:27:53,740 --> 00:27:58,130 Now we are slowly trying to get to grips with the physics going on here. 302 00:27:58,910 --> 00:28:04,490 We are making major strides in optimising some field configurations. 303 00:28:04,790 --> 00:28:10,700 So what I mean by this, I showed you those magnetic flux surfaces, you know, the purple ones and how they're all twisted. 304 00:28:11,120 --> 00:28:15,439 Well, I can change them in a certain way and move them about and use machine learning 305 00:28:15,440 --> 00:28:19,610 and other clever techniques to try and optimise these for my confinement. 306 00:28:20,480 --> 00:28:26,480 The other thing which I kind of want to maybe emphasise a little bit is those horrible looking coils that we had. 307 00:28:26,480 --> 00:28:31,880 Everyone in this room would be very entitled to say, they look like an engineering nightmare. 308 00:28:32,210 --> 00:28:36,350 How are we ever going to have that being a commercially viable saying? 309 00:28:36,350 --> 00:28:38,540 How are we ever going to have this working? 310 00:28:38,750 --> 00:28:45,380 Well, I'm here to tell you, physicists are saving the day because some people are working very hard to optimise these clothes for error. 311 00:28:45,890 --> 00:28:52,580 What do I mean by that? If you give me your pragmatic successes that I want and you're saying this is the surface, 312 00:28:52,580 --> 00:28:57,020 I want these give me the coils in which I have as much tolerance as possible, 313 00:28:57,380 --> 00:29:01,400 and I'll still get the same magnetic flux of this, all the same confinement properties. 314 00:29:01,850 --> 00:29:07,010 And the reason we really want this is despite us all wanting to think we can do our best job ever, 315 00:29:07,310 --> 00:29:10,730 we can never arrange these coils down to atomic precision. 316 00:29:10,730 --> 00:29:14,900 So we need to allow some kind of error because we can never get them perfect. 317 00:29:15,800 --> 00:29:22,490 And that has been some real strides in this area, meaning that these horrible looking coils are becoming more and more accessible to us. 318 00:29:23,480 --> 00:29:28,250 And again, it'd be a mistake not to mention the fact that there is research into turbulence. 319 00:29:28,610 --> 00:29:32,740 And yes, I, too, if I ever meet, God, will say why turbulence? 320 00:29:32,840 --> 00:29:34,370 As Michael put in that lovely quote, 321 00:29:34,970 --> 00:29:41,810 you might be noticing that the overarching theme here of why we are making so much progress with salary does the maybe we 322 00:29:41,810 --> 00:29:49,430 haven't made in the past is due to numerics really and it's actually something I personally spend a lot of time focusing on. 323 00:29:49,760 --> 00:29:53,480 So a large portion of my Ph.D. has been to develop code. 324 00:29:54,650 --> 00:30:02,120 So you may, if you recall, cast your mind back to Michael's talk where we had those that picture of the Tokamak. 325 00:30:02,120 --> 00:30:05,330 It was beautiful. It was green and blue and speckled. 326 00:30:05,750 --> 00:30:11,320 That was actually done by simulating a single field line and stitching them all together. 327 00:30:11,340 --> 00:30:19,760 We can recreate the whole surface. And the reason we're allowed to do this is because the that the Tokamak has this nice symmetry about it. 328 00:30:20,300 --> 00:30:22,700 Stellarator doesn't have these symmetries. 329 00:30:23,030 --> 00:30:29,570 So the codes that we currently have that have been working for Tokamaks don't necessarily apply to Stellarator as well. 330 00:30:30,020 --> 00:30:37,400 If you think just kind of vaguely each field line on my own, my surface is going to expose a different geometry, right? 331 00:30:37,700 --> 00:30:42,320 So I can't stitch them together. I can't just reproduce the same field line and hope for the best. 332 00:30:43,160 --> 00:30:50,960 So I need to be a bit more clever. And part of my research especially has been producing a code that simulates the entire flux at phase. 333 00:30:51,200 --> 00:30:56,510 So now we can look at fusion simulations of the entire thing and we can see how geometry is going to influence this. 334 00:30:57,050 --> 00:31:01,250 So like I said, we are making big strides in these in these areas. 335 00:31:01,490 --> 00:31:07,790 But largely this is due to massive advancements, which is why it's taken so long for accelerators to catch up. 336 00:31:08,540 --> 00:31:15,460 Okay. So why do I think that Celera is all going to be the future of fusion? 337 00:31:15,570 --> 00:31:23,640 You know, why do I have such strong faith in them? I'm going to draw your attention back to the schematics on the board, which I had up before. 338 00:31:24,030 --> 00:31:28,890 And these, again, just remind you of the magnetic field strength of a tokamak and the stellarator. 339 00:31:29,460 --> 00:31:34,040 And I spoke before about these problematic trapped particles. 340 00:31:34,110 --> 00:31:39,210 I said they are they could be worse in a stellarator because we have these more complicated geometries. 341 00:31:39,740 --> 00:31:46,860 Now, it's just hard to understand that really this actually these complicated geometries could be accelerated to make a string. 342 00:31:47,900 --> 00:31:52,200 And to demonstrate why this could be the case, I'm going to use one example of these trap particles. 343 00:31:52,730 --> 00:31:56,340 So I told you that we could get trapped here, but we could also get trapped here. 344 00:31:56,360 --> 00:32:00,680 Problematic that some people in the audience may have already asked themselves, 345 00:32:01,100 --> 00:32:10,310 why couldn't we trap up here instead where we have like in the schematic good kind of where turbulence and instabilities all stabilise. 346 00:32:10,820 --> 00:32:14,990 And this is exactly why I think Stellarator could be the future or at least could 347 00:32:14,990 --> 00:32:20,330 give us a beacon of light forward in fusion research is because some people who 348 00:32:20,330 --> 00:32:24,860 are extremely clever and probably cleverer than I am could design a shape in such 349 00:32:24,860 --> 00:32:28,759 a way to take advantage of the fact that we could cause all of our trapping. 350 00:32:28,760 --> 00:32:33,520 For example, in a good capital region, we could design autocrats as right. 351 00:32:33,560 --> 00:32:38,320 We could design accelerators in order to be favourable for fusion and favourable for life. 352 00:32:38,350 --> 00:32:44,450 So what I want out of my device. So with all these opportunities, it gives scientists, physicists, 353 00:32:44,490 --> 00:32:52,100 people who are researching this space to be more intelligent with that design and to really try and determine what they want. 354 00:32:52,450 --> 00:32:58,540 And so this is exactly why I think celebrate is all they all could at least be the teacher of magnetic confinement region. 355 00:32:58,880 --> 00:33:01,370 It's because this big a parameter space that they offer, 356 00:33:01,640 --> 00:33:07,640 despite it being horribly complicated and somewhat scary, it offers more opportunities to control. 357 00:33:08,000 --> 00:33:13,670 And it means that with more numerical advancements, we could potentially adjust it in a way that we want. 358 00:33:14,450 --> 00:33:18,430 And this isn't just me thinking, Oh, this could be great. This actually has been great. 359 00:33:18,440 --> 00:33:23,920 So to demonstrate that this is not just entirely me having wishful thinking, I want to show you another video. 360 00:33:24,970 --> 00:33:32,070 So before I showed you that video of a non optimised device, this is not one that has been optimised for that main classical transport. 361 00:33:32,320 --> 00:33:35,050 So achievement of size of next the device in Germany. 362 00:33:35,500 --> 00:33:40,050 So again, the red lines are showing the the particle directories and you can see the parts and particles. 363 00:33:40,060 --> 00:33:45,250 Again, no problems. We don't have any issues with these guys that they're quite happy on a flat surface. 364 00:33:46,380 --> 00:33:51,330 And now we're going to look at the trap particles, which before, if you remember, caused us problems. 365 00:33:51,330 --> 00:33:55,650 They radially drifted away from our device and that's extremely bad behaviour. 366 00:33:56,040 --> 00:34:02,610 So again, these are the the Trump articles, they start on the successes and you'll see as they come back around they have drifted away. 367 00:34:03,020 --> 00:34:08,190 But by the time they closed back into the same location, the radial drift has averaged to zero. 368 00:34:08,670 --> 00:34:12,840 And so this is an example of optimisation for these types of problems. 369 00:34:13,110 --> 00:34:16,560 And this actually, like I said, has been built and it has gone to operation. 370 00:34:16,930 --> 00:34:22,380 And so this shows that theory can sometimes prevail and we can make these types of strides forward. 371 00:34:23,480 --> 00:34:29,900 Okay. So, you know, just to then whet your appetite for the future accelerators and what this could mean. 372 00:34:30,350 --> 00:34:36,230 These are some wacky designs that people have come up with that potentially have very good confinement properties. 373 00:34:36,590 --> 00:34:41,240 So I wouldn't claim to to tell you anything about these confinement properties, 374 00:34:41,540 --> 00:34:44,900 but you can see they're getting a bit more crazy like this one here is wild. 375 00:34:46,400 --> 00:34:52,790 So this just shows that with more intelligence, with more numerical advances, we are actually making some strides. 376 00:34:53,090 --> 00:34:56,230 These could be the future devices that power our national grid. 377 00:34:56,250 --> 00:35:03,230 So we know. But the idea here is, I think the fact that we have more geometry, we have more control, we have more opportunities. 378 00:35:03,650 --> 00:35:08,140 You might think initially this is terrifying, but this actually could be one of the best things about Cellarity. 379 00:35:09,110 --> 00:35:16,610 And so to almost as I told you before, that we had this really slow race of tortoise races, quarters of stellarator and tokamak. 380 00:35:17,560 --> 00:35:22,810 What I'd actually like you to think it's more of a quote from Paris, where, you know, the Tokamak flew forward. 381 00:35:22,810 --> 00:35:27,130 It started off great, had a lot of advances at the beginning, but it hit this wall. 382 00:35:27,340 --> 00:35:30,610 It now is now limited, partly because of its geometry. 383 00:35:31,120 --> 00:35:34,540 You know, the Stellarator has been chugging along in the background. 384 00:35:34,750 --> 00:35:39,250 We've made some advancements. It's coming further forward. It's managed to reach up to the have. 385 00:35:39,250 --> 00:35:42,340 You never know. In the future it may completely take over. 386 00:35:42,790 --> 00:35:45,129 So with that, I want to thank you for your time, 387 00:35:45,130 --> 00:35:53,770 and I hope I've at least tried to convince you that Stellarator could be the twisted tokamak of the future.