For decades, scientists have been working to develop reactors that can achieve fusion to meet the increasing need for clean and limitless energy. The success of such experiments depends on multiple ...

For decades, physicists have been puzzled by a phenomenon inside fusion reactors that defies ...

A powerful new technique harnesses swirling plasma inside laser-blasted microtubes to produce record-breaking magnetic fields—rivaling those near neutron stars—all within a compact laboratory setup.

Magnetized plasmas have rarely been studied as nonlinear photonics media, yet they possess unique properties: Compared to unmagnetized plasmas, magnetization introduces additional resonances, which ...

It’s rarely appreciated just how much more complicated nuclear fusion is than nuclear fission. Whereas the latter involves a process that happens all around us without any human involvement, and where ...

Scientists are embracing imperfection, using less-than-ideal magnetic fields to make the plasma more manageable. In the Japanese art of Kintsugi, an artist takes the broken shards of a bowl and fuses ...

Although the idea of containing a plasma within a magnetic field seems straightforward at first, plasmas are highly dynamic systems that will happily escape magnetic confinement if given half a chance ...

A Sweden-based firm has launched a plasma confinement project to achieve commercially viable fusion energy. The TauEB project by Novatron Fusion Group aims to revolutionize plasma confinement and ...

The way scientists think about fusion changed forever in 2022, when what some called the experiment of the century demonstrated for the first time that fusion can be a viable source of clean energy.

(Editor’s note: The following article originally appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in October, 1971. It is reprinted here in full in November 2024—so readers can get a sense of how ...