plasma_physics_laboratory

Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPL), The, was founded in 1951 by Lyman Spitzer, Jr., chairman of the Astronomy Department. As an astrophysicist, Spitzer had studied the behavior of ionized gases, or plasmas, in interstellar space. Inspired by the hope of finding a new source of power for peaceful applications, he conceived the idea of confining a plasma in a figure-8 shaped tube using magnetic forces generated by coils wrapped around the outside. Spitzer reasoned that, at sufficiently high temperature, the nuclear particles in a plasma so contained would undergo fusion and release energy. Because only very low density plasma could be contained in this way, there would be no possibility of explosion.

Spitzer called his concept ``the stellarator,'' and took it to the United States Atomic Energy Commission on May 11, 1951. A contract was soon written, and work was begun at the University's newly acquired Forrestal Research Center. The code name Project Matterhorn was used to designate the stellarator program and, for a short time at the beginning, other classified work. Theoretical work was supplemented by experiments, and over a period of twenty years, a series of research devices of progressively larger size bore such names as Model A, B-3, Model C, Spherator, and FM-1. Meanwhile, in 1958, fusion work had been declassified. Graduate instruction in plasma physics was immediately introduced, graduate students made their appearance at Project Matterhorn, and in 1961, the name Plasma Physics Laboratory was adopted. The same year Melvin B. Gottlieb succeeded Spitzer as Director of the laboratory.

Magnetic confinement proved to be subject to a bewildering variety of instabilities that theoreticians, experimentalists, and engineers attacked one by one. Late in the 1950s the figure-8 geometry was abandoned in favor of the ``racetrack, '' and this in turn gave way in 1970 to the ``tokamak,'' a Russian design closely related to the stellarator concept. Princeton's Symmetric Tokamak (1970-1974) achieved the same greatly improved plasma confinement previously reported by the Russians. It was followed by the Adiabatic Thoroidal Compressor (1972-1976), which investigated new heating methods and reached an electron temperature of 22,000,000øC, and the $14,000,000 Princeton Large Torus (1975- ) designed for the scaling of results to larger size. Other facilities projected are the $18,000,000 Poloidal Divertor Experiment (1978), dedicated to controlling the level of plasma impurities and the $228,000,000 Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (1981), which should actually produce short bursts of fusion energy for test purposes.

By 1976 the number of employees had increased to 800 and the annual operating budget was approximately $28,000,000.

Earl C. Tanner

From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978).

Go to Search A Princeton Companion