Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory for plasma physics and nuclear fusion science. Its primary mission is research into and development of fusion as an energy source. It is known for the development of the stellarator and tokamak designs, along with numerous fundamental advances in plasma physics and the exploration of many other plasma confinement concepts.
PPPL grew out of the top-secret Cold War project to control thermonuclear reactions, called Project Matterhorn. The focus of this program changed from H-bombs to fusion power in 1951, when Lyman Spitzer developed the stellarator concept and was granted funding from the Atomic Energy Commission to study the concept. This led to a series of machines in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1961, after declassification, Project Matterhorn was renamed the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
PPPL's stellarators proved unable to meet their performance goals. In 1968, Soviet's claims of excellent performance on their tokamaks generated intense scepticism, and to test it, PPPL's Model C stellarator was converted to a tokamak. It verified the Soviet claims, and since that time, PPPL has been a worldwide leader in tokamak theory and design, building a series of record-breaking machines including the Princeton Large Torus, TFTR and many others. Dozens of smaller machines were also built to test particular problems and solutions, including the ATC, NSTX, and LTX.
PPPL is operated by Princeton University on the Forrestal Campus in Plainsboro Township, New Jersey.
History
Formation
In 1950, John Wheeler was setting up a secret H-bomb research lab at Princeton University. Lyman Spitzer, Jr., an avid mountaineer, was aware of this program and suggested the name "Project Matterhorn".Spitzer, a professor of astronomy, had for many years been involved in the study of very hot rarefied gases in interstellar space. While leaving for a ski trip to Aspen in February 1951, his father called and told him to read the front page of the New York Times. The paper had a story about claims released the day before in Argentina that a relatively unknown German scientist named Ronald Richter had achieved nuclear fusion in his Huemul Project. Spitzer ultimately dismissed these claims, and they were later proven erroneous, but the story got him thinking about fusion. While riding the chairlift at Aspen, he struck upon a new concept to confine a plasma for long periods so it could be heated to fusion temperatures. He called this concept the stellarator.
Later that year he took this design to the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington. As a result of this meeting and a review of the invention by scientists throughout the nation, the stellarator proposal was funded in 1951. As the device would produce high-energy neutrons, which could be used for breeding weapon fuel, the program was classified and carried out as part of Project Matterhorn. Matterhorn ultimately ended its involvement in the bomb field in 1954, becoming entirely devoted to the fusion power field.
In 1958, this magnetic fusion research was declassified following the United Nations International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. This generated an influx of graduate students eager to learn the "new" physics, which in turn influenced the lab to concentrate more on basic research.
The early figure-8 stellarators included: Model-A, Model-B, Model-B2, Model-B3. Model-B64 was a square with round corners, and Model-B65 had a racetrack configuration. The last and most powerful stellarator at this time was the "racetrack" Model C.
Tokamak
By the mid-1960s it was clear something was fundamentally wrong with the stellarators, as they leaked fuel at rates far beyond what theory predicted, rates that carried away energy from the plasma that was far beyond what the fusion reactions could ever produce. Spitzer became extremely skeptical that fusion energy was possible and expressed this opinion in very public fashion in 1965 at an international meeting in the UK. At the same meeting, the Soviet delegation announced results about 10 times better than any previous device, which Spitzer dismissed as a measurement error.At the next meeting in 1968, the Soviets presented considerable data from their devices that showed even greater performance, about 100 times the Bohm diffusion limit. An enormous argument broke out between the AEC and the various labs about whether this was real. When a UK team verified the results in 1969, the AEC suggested PPPL to convert their Model C to a tokamak to test it, as the only lab willing to build one from scratch, Oak Ridge, would need some time to build theirs. Seeing the possibility of being bypassed in the fusion field, PPPL eventually agreed to convert the Model C to what became the Symmetric Tokamak, quickly verifying the approach.
Two small machines followed the ST, exploring ways to heat the plasma, and then the Princeton Large Torus to test whether the theory that larger machines would be more stable was true. Starting in 1975, PLT verified these "scaling laws" and then went on to add neutral beam injection from Oak Ridge that resulted in a series of record-setting plasma temperatures, eventually topping out at 78 million kelvins, well beyond what was needed for a practical fusion power system. Its success was major news.
With this string of successes, PPPL had little trouble winning the bid to build an even larger machine, one specifically designed to reach "breakeven" while running on an actual fusion fuel, rather than a test gas. This produced the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor, or TFTR, which was completed in 1982. After a lengthy breaking-in period, TFTR began slowly increasing the temperature and density of the fuel, while introducing deuterium gas as the fuel. In April 1986, it demonstrated a combination of density and confinement, the so-called fusion triple product, well beyond what was needed for a practical reactor. In July, it reached a temperature of 200 million kelvins, far beyond what was needed. However, when the system was operated with both of these conditions at the same time, a high enough triple product and temperature, the system became unstable. Three years of effort failed to address these issues, and TFTR never reached its goal. The system continued performing basic studies on these problems until being shut down in 1997. Beginning in 1993, TFTR was the first in the world to use 1:1 mixtures of deuterium–tritium. In 1994 it yielded an unprecedented 10.7 megawatts of fusion power.
Later designs
In 1999, the National Spherical Torus Experiment, based on the spherical tokamak concept, came online at the PPPL.Odd-parity heating was demonstrated in the 4 cm radius PFRC-1 experiment in 2006. PFRC-2 has a plasma radius of 8 cm. Studies of electron heating in PFRC-2 reached 500 eV with pulse lengths of 300 ms.
In 2015, PPPL completed an upgrade to NSTX to produce NSTX-U that made it the most powerful experimental fusion facility, or tokamak, of its type in the world.
In 2017, the group received a Phase II NIAC grant along with two NASA STTRs funding the RF subsystem and superconducting coil subsystem.
In 2024, the lab announced MUSE, a new stellarator. MUSE uses rare-earth permanent magnets with a field strength that can exceed 1.2 teslas. The device uses quasiaxisymmetry, a subtype of quasisymmetry. The research team claimed that its use of quasisymmetry was more sophisticated than prior devices. Also in 2024, PPL announced a reinforcement learning model that could forecast tearing mode instabilities up to 300 milliseconds in advance. That is enough time for the plasma controller to adjust operating parameters to prevent the tear and maintain H-mode performance.
Directors
The following persons served as the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory director:| No. | Image | Director | Term start | Term end | |
| 1 | Lyman Spitzer | 1951 | 1961 | ||
| 2 | Melvin B. Gottlieb | 1961 | 1980 | ||
| 3 | Harold Fürth | 1981 | 1990 | ||
| 4 | Ronald C. Davidson | 1991 | December 31, 1996 | ||
| interim | John A. Schmidt | January 1, 1997 | June 30, 1997 | ||
| 5 | Robert J. Goldston | July 1, 1997 | 2008 | ||
| 6 | Stewart C. Prager | 2008 | September 26, 2016 | ||
| interim | Terrence K. Brog | September 26, 2016 | September 2017 | ||
| interim | Richard J. Hawryluk | September 2017 | June 30, 2018 | ||
| 7 | Steven Cowley | July 1, 2018 | present |
Table notes:
Timeline of major research projects and experiments
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id:sphtok value:rgb legend: Spherical_Tokamak
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from:1951 till:1961 text: "Spitzer"
from:1961 till:1980 color: dir2 text: "Gottlieb"
from:1981 till:1990 text: "Fürth"
from:1991 till:1996 color: dir2 text: "Davidson"
from:1997 till:2008 text: "Goldston"
from:2008 till:2016 color: dir2 text: "Prager"
from:2018 till:end text: "Cowley"
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bar:fusion1 from:1953 till:1962 shift: color:stella text: "Model A/B stellarators"
bar:fusion2 from:1962 till:1969 shift: color:stella text: "Model C stellarator"
bar:fusion1 from:1970 till:1974 shift: color:tok text: "Symmetric Tokamak"
bar:fusion2 from:1975 till:1986 shift: color:tok text: "Princeton Large Torus"
bar:fusion1 from:1982 till:1997 shift: color:tok text: "Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor"
bar:fusion1 from:1999 till:end shift: color:sphtok text: "National Spherical Torus Experiment"
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bar:fusion3 from:1971 till:1976 shift: color:sphe text: "Floating Multipole-1"
bar:fusion4 from:1972 till:1976 shift: color:tok text: "Adiabatic Toroidal Compressor"
bar:fusion5 from:1978 till:1983 shift: text: "Poloidal Divertor Experiment"
bar:fusion6 from:1984 till:1992 shift: text: "Princeton Beta Experiment"
bar:fusion3 from:2005 till:2008 shift: color:sphtok text: "Current Drive Experiment"
bar:fusion4 from:2008 till:end shift: color:sphtok text: "Lithium Tokamak Experiment"
bar:fusion5 from:1995 till:end shift: text: "Magnetic Reconnection Experiment"
bar:fusion6 from:1999 till:end shift: text: "Hall Thruster Experiment"
from:2008 till:end shift: text: "Field Reversed Configuration"