Internship at the Laplace Laboratory in Toulouse, France
Reported by Vladislav Mikhailov. Powered by FuseNet.

First of all, I would like to start by expressing my sincere gratitude to FuseNet for supporting educational programs for European fusion students. Thanks to their support, I got the opportunity to visit the Laplace Laboratory at the University of Toulouse, for a 2-month internship at their plasma fusion research group.

Langmuir probe measurements of plasma parameters for different magnetic field configurations

During my time in Toulouse, I spend my days researching the processes that govern the behavior of cold plasmas in large magnetic fields, which is very important in the context of divertor and scrape-off-layer modelling. More specific, during my internship I have conducted Langmuir probe experiments in order to determine the electron and ion densities of the plasma, as well as the electron temperature and the floating and plasma potentials. These quantities were extracted from the Volt-Ampere characteristics (or IV-characteristics) of the probes for various magnetic field configurations.

The first problem that I encountered during these measurements, was that the noise was different for each measurement. Therefore, I had to process the data using a Savitzky-Golay algorithm, before I could get the results I wanted. Futhermore, my internship gave me the opportunity to collect a lot of data for my Master diploma work, on which I’ll continue to work after I return back home at the University in St.-Petersburg.

A fruitful cientific collaboration

FuseNet has also enabled my supervisor to visit me in Toulouse, where he has shared his experience with the Laplace research team. For me, my internship has been a great experience and I hope that our universities will continue this mutually fruitful scientific collaboration.