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PhD Event 2015 - Aoife reports on Day 3

PhD Event 2015 - Aoife reports on Day 3

FuseNet coordinates the 2015 PhD event for students in fusion science and engineering that takes place in Prague. One of the PhD students present, Aoife Somers reports: 

Tuesday, November 17

After a lovely breakfast at the hotel our session started off with a talk by Dr. Jochen Linke from the ForschungsZentrum-Jülich, who discussed material issues for plasma facing components in future fusion devices. This included the advantages and disadvantages of different wall materials. He explained JET's ITER like wall and also discussed not only the challenges of the heat loads onto the first wall materials but also sputtering effects and irradiation and their synergy.

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Tuesday morning presentation by prof. Jochen Linke

Student talks

Following our coffee break a number of students presented their work which gave us an insight into their scientific results. Additionally they highlighted certain challenges they encountered during their PhD studies as well as personal achievements.

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Vivid discussions during the poster session

A second poster session was held early afternoon which gave everybody a chance to discuss their work and find others who work on similar problems and get ideas for future collaborations. The session showed how diverse the work on fusion really is.

Public communication

Daniel Clery from Science Magazine and Sabina Griffith from ITER gave insight into the difficulties that can arise for fusion in public communication. Since ITER is the first of its kind, they highlighted the difficulties you encounter with such a huge project. It was useful, as each of us will have to deal with public communication at some point when obtaining a doctorate degree.

Then in the afternoon we got the chance to attend three different talks - all related to plasma physics but not fusion plasmas - depending on our personal preference. One was on plasma accretion near block holes, one on industrial plasmas and one on the magentosphere of the earth. It was interesting to hear about the synergies with these other fields.

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Presentations by Sabina Griffith and Daniel Clery about Public Communication

Czech culture on a boat

After our final talk about burning plasma challenges by Prof. A. Fasoli, the event closed with a wonderful boat cruise that featured the Czech culture with its food and drinks. As cherry on the cake, we could experience the tokamak sound, as this was the name of the music group that played live music for us on the boat (http://tokamak.cz/). We all had a good, long night...

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Party on the cruise boat