The university has unique and comprehensive facilities for studying magnetic confinement, plasma heating and related problems in fusion research. The department has several plasma experiments suitable for graduate student research. The MEDUSA tokamak (major radius = 10-15 cm., aspect ratio = 1.5, plasma current = 30-40 kA) is used to investigate plasma physics questions in small aspect ratio tokamaks. Planning is underway for a successor device, Pegasus (major radius = .2-.45 m, aspect ratio = 1.1-2, and plasma current = 100-400 kA). Other research is being conducted on an inertial-electrostatic confinement device.

Devices for studying basic plasma issues in EP include a high-magnetic-field steady-state helicon source, several inductive sources, and two triple plasma devices.

Plasma physics facilities in other departments are available to EP students. For example, several EP students have done PhD theses on the MST reversed-field pinch in the physics department. The HSX stellarator under construction in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is also available to EP students.

In addition to on-campus facilities, EP students have utilized major facilities at national laboratories. Several students have done their research on the TFTR tokamak at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, both on location and remotely (via computer networks).

The extensive facilities of the Center for Plasma-Aided Manufacturing are being used by EP faculty and students for research relevant to the industrial applications of plasmas. Plasma etching research uses capacitive (parallel plate RIE), non-propagating inductive and propagating inductive (helicon) tools operating at 13.56 MHz, and microwave (ECR) tools operating at 2.45 GHz. A large variety of gas phase diagnostics (arguably the best in the world) and charged particle diagnostics have been implemented to provide an extensive database for modeling.

Copyright 2005 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System Date last modified: Tuesday, 22-Jun-1999 09:41:40 CDT Content by: neep@engr.wisc.edu Thank you for visiting!