Skip to main content

20th International Stellarator-Heliotron Workshop - Greifswald, Germany
Report by Sophia Henneberg. Powered by FuseNet

The educational trip to the Stellarator-Heliotron workshop was an inspiring experience, especially because of the enthusiasm towards the new stellarator experiment Wendelstein-7X which will start operating soon.

Stellarators are a promising candidate for more optimised fusion power because they do not rely on currents in the plasma (which eliminates a whole class of instabilities) and they are designed to work in a steady state. Therefore stellarators are directly relevant for fusion power as an alternative path to tokamaks. As many aspects of tokamak theory are becoming reliant on understanding 3D effects (e.g. RMPs), the inclusion of stellarator physics could be beneficial to fusion studies in general.

The talks and posters during the workshop covered a wide range of Stellarator research topics: Edge-core coupling of turbulence and transport, Interactions among energetic particles, MHD and Transport, Reactor perspectives and many more topics; some of them directly relevant for tokamak research. Professor Thomas Klinger – the head of the Stellarator Transport and Stability Division - presented an overview talk about the construction work of W7X which showed the complexity and difficulties of such a huge project but also the “happy end” that W7X will start soon.

This workshop consisted not only out of presentations. It also included several social events which are obviously an excellent way to network. They organized a welcome reception with a tour through the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald and a conference dinner on Thursday evening. Additionally, there was a walking tour through the city of Greifswald and most excitingly a tour to Wendelstein-7X.

I would like to thank FuseNet for funding my trip to the International Stellarator-Heliotron workshop. This helped me to extend my knowledge towards Stellarator Physics but also to learn more about overlapping stellarator-tokamak research.