Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (Garching)

The Joint European Torus generates 69 megajoules of energy from 0.2 milligrams of fuel - as much as is set free by burning two kilgrams of coal

The new team of Vice-Presidents includes three women. This means women now hold the majority on the Executive Committee

The Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) was the victim of a cyberattack via the destructive malware EMOTET on 12 June 2022

European joint experiment prepares transition to large-scale ITER project

Through the integration of the IPP into the Max Planck Society, the Institute is opening a new chapter in its history, which goes back to Werner Heisenberg

The National Ignition Facility in the USA announced a breakthrough in fusion research in December 2022. Nuclear fusion offers the promise of a clean and practically inexhaustible source of energy. The Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics is also working on ways to harness this. The institute’s scientific director, Sibylle Günter, and director emeritus, Karl Lackner, share insights into where some of the public and private fusion projects stand – and how they compare to the concepts their institute is researching.

Science without computers? Unthinkable, nowadays! Yet over half a century ago, that was commonplace. Then, in the early 1950s, mathematician and physicist Heinz Billing entered the scene - and introduced the Max Planck Society to electronic computing. It all started with the "Göttingen 1."

To consolidate the scientific basis for a fusion reactor – this was Sibylle Günter’s objective when she took up her post as Scientific Director of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. But ever since the German government renounced nuclear fission, nuclear fusion has also had a difficult time politically.

Fusion plasmas generate such intense heat that the walls of the surrounding vacuum vessel could be damaged. However, a newly discovered physical phenomenon, known as the X-point emitter, offers a promising method for significantly reducing this thermal load in future fusion reactors. Additionally, plasmas formed using this technique exhibit other advantageous properties.

Energetic particles in plasmas are often the cause of interesting wave-particle interactions that fundamentally influence the stability of the plasma. In fusion plasmas enclosed by magnetic fields, for example, they can excite special forms of oscillation; the solar wind hitting the Earth's atmosphere can generate chorus waves. We are developing novel numerical methods to simulate such phenomena, combining efficient fluid models to describe the wave with more elaborate kinetic models to describe the particles.

The aim of fusion research is to use fusion of light atomic nuclei to generate energy in a power plant. A number of problems remain to be solved on this way, including understanding or control of large-scale plasma instabilities. These include Edge-Localized Modes, periodic instabilities at the plasma edge that can eject ten percent of the plasma energy in less than a millisecond. In numerical simulations, it has now been possible for the first time to calculate their full non-linear dynamics over several cycles, thereby reproducing most experimental observations.

Transferring extreme powers from the hot plasma of a future fusion power plant to the surrounding material surfaces in a gentle manner is a central challenge for science. For this purpose, in experiments at the ASDEX Upgrade fusion device in Garching and JET in Culham/Great Britain, suitable plasma scenarios were developed. In those scenarios, the specific contamination of the hydrogen plasma by addition of impurity atoms plays an important role.

A proven method of heating plasmas in fusion devices to many millions of degrees is to beam in radio waves of ion cyclotron frequency. This heating method, however, has involved disadvantages in plasma vessels with metal walls, as envisaged for a future power plant. The antenna beaming the waves into the plasma has now been successfully optimised to make radio-wave heating compatible with metallic walls.