Tube Strike Travel Advice
We are intending to proceed with the event despite this weeks’ planned tube strikes, and advise you to plan your route carefully and leave extra time to travel: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/
Meet our new professors
Jeremy Chittenden, Professor of Plasma Physics and Co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies in the Department of Physics
The lecture is free to attend and open to all, but registration in advance in required – contact the events team for your place.
To interact about this lecture on Twitter, use the hashtag #futurefusion.
Thermonuclear fusion is the power source of the stars and has the potential to be an almost inexhaustible source of clean, renewable energy. Sixty years of research have revealed a number of Nature’s pitfalls that have so far prevented fusion energy becoming a reality.
By anticipating these problems and designing ways around them, we are now approaching the extreme conditions required to ignite a fusion plasma and produce a large release of energy. In this lecture I will describe how computer simulations are helping us edge closer towards ignition.
Even if these experiments are successful, there is still a long way to go before inertial fusion can be become a realistic energy source. I will also describe attempts to realise ignition in simpler (and cheaper) fusion targets, such as crushing the fusion fuel using intense magnetic fields using high current generators. Such approaches may eventually prove more practical for energy production.
Speaker Biography
Jeremy Chittenden came to Imperial College London in 1987 to study for his PhD in Plasma Physics and has stayed here ever since. During the early 1990s he helped to build the MAGPIE pulsed power generator and undertook experiments investigating imploding radiating plasmas. More recently his efforts have concentrated on developing computational models of plasma experiments based at large-scale laser and pulsed power facilities around the world. Jeremy has research interests in the study of high energy density states of matter, the use of laboratory plasma experiments in astrophysics research, and the generation of energy through inertial confinement fusion.