On Monday, the Carolus Magnus Summer School kicked off. Two of the students attending, Stéphanie Panayotis and Rachel McAdams, will report their experiences during the summer school here.

From Stéphanie:

Wednesday September 7:

On wednesday, Prof. Samm gave us an overview of plasma wall interaction. He outlined that it is a real issue for the realization of a fusion reactor.
Then we continued on to the other side of fusion, the engineering side, with an introduction about feedback controls in tokamaks.

Finally, in the evening, we had an entertaining lecture on exotic plasmas. Three physicists conducted funny experiments involving plasma discharges. Everybody was hypnotized by the beauty of these experiments.

Thursday September 8:

Thursday was the first day outside of the weertenbergen park. We went to the FZ-Juelich research center to have some lectures on transport in plasma edge, fast particle heating,operational limits and limiting instabilities in tokamaks and to discover the Textor tokamak.

That was an interesting visit since we have had the opportunity to see the similarities and the difference between several tokamaks. Most of us were very surprised to see that they use wood to stop radiations getting out of the vessel!!

Then, to leave us an edible memory of this day, we had a nice barbecue in Juelich. That was the opportunity to have a good time together and taste german  food.

From Rachel:

After the weekend, we started off this week with an emphasis on edge
processes and diagnostics. We are discovering how complicated the edge of
the plasma can be, and the challenges that our technology faces when
constructing an ITER first wall: the materials difficulties are substantial
and it becomes clear that research and development in materials science
will be vital.

Tomorrow we head to Rijnhuizen to visit MAGNUM.