Fonck receives two awards for plasma research

Raymond J. Fonck (20K JPG)

An accomplished diagnostician and, as one colleague called him, a "first-rate experimental physicist," Professor Ray Fonck is the recipient of both the 1999 Byron Bird Award for Excellence in a Research Publication, given by the College of Engineering, and the 1999 Excellence in Plasma Physics Award, given by the American Physical Society. In response to a call from the Department of Energy in the late 1980s for a diagnostic that would characterize fluctuations in toroidal, magnetically confined plasmas, Fonck developed beam emission spectroscopy (BES). He deployed this new diagnostic and used it to obtain new fundamental results on anomalous plasma transport. His research is detailed in a series of more than 50 (14 key) publications from 1990 through 1997. Today BES is the standard diagnostic for characterizing and understanding plasma fluctuations in major tokamak experiments, as well as the standard of comparison for proposed new fluctuation diagnostics. Fonck earned his BS and PhD in physics from UW-Madison in 1973 and 1978, respectively. He became director of the PDX project at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, returned to the UW in 1989, and was promoted to professor in 1992. Fonck teaches lab courses in experimental plasma physics and nuclear instrumentation.