Establishment of the Plasma Physics Laboratory

The Plasma Physics Laboratory, founded in 1961, is one of the leading university laboratories for the study of plasma physics in the United States. It was established by founding faculty, including Robert Gross and C.K. (John) Chu, to begin a long tradition at the forefront of high-temperature and fusion plasmas and prominence in APAM, including a major expansion of the fusion effort in 1975.

There are four experimental facilities. The Columbia High-Beta Tokamak (HBT-EP) supports the national program to develop controlled fusion energy. It utilizes high voltage, pulsed power systems, and laser and magnetic diagnostics to study the properties of high-beta plasmas and the use of feedback stabilization to increase the achievable beta. A collaborative program with the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and the DIII-D tokamak group at General Atomics is studying the properties of high-beta plasmas in order to maximize fusion power production in these large, neutral beam-heated tokamaks and spherical tori. The plasma physics group and MIT conduct joint experiments with laboratory magnetospheres and advanced models for space weather and radiation belt dynamics. The stellarator known as Columbia Nonneutral Torus (CNT) conducts research on the magnetohydrodynamic stability, microwave heating, and microwave diagnostics of neutral stellarator plasmas. Two smaller devices investigate respectively an innovative tokamak-stellarator hybrid plasma confinement concept and the use of toroidal electron-heated plasmas as sources of ions for accelerators. The Columbia Linear Machine (CLM) is a continuously operating, linear mirror device for the study of collisionless plasma instabilities, plasma, transport, and feedback stabilization. Columbia’s Collisionless Terrella Experiment investigates plasma transport in magnetospheric geometry and the generation of strong plasma flow from nonlinear electrostatic potentials.