This was a lot of fun (and very challenging) to write!

We replaced gas boiler with a high temperature hydronic heat pump so we could keep our radiators. It's -15 C outside, and it's still pumping out 55 C water. What remarkable technology!

Big if true.

I spent (US) Thanksgiving in Toronto, on a mini sabbatical at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics talking turbulence and reconnection with folks there. There are some intriguing links between laboratory plasma turbulence measurements and pulsar scintillation that need to be explored!

I spent (US) Thanksgiving in Toronto, on a mini sabbatical at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics talking turbulence and reconnection with folks there. There are some intriguing links between laboratory plasma turbulence measurements and pulsar scintillation that need to be explored!

What a great APS DPP! Here's my team with our group poster. #plasma

I'm packing for APS DPP in Long Beach Ca tomorrow, which includes the most vital item for any US conference: half decent tea bags!

A grad student is 3D printing a scale model of PUFFIN, but it comes out with these terrifying eldritch trees as support structures. Very disturbing.

Wait, your lab doesn't have a popcorn maker? That sounds unbearable.

Wait, your lab doesn't have a popcorn maker? That sounds unbearable.

For the last few years I've made an overview poster for the APS Division of Plasma Physics, featuring the work done in my group over the last 12 months. It's a great opportunity to look back and see what we've achieved, and a good source of material for future talks!

Somewhere up above there's a stunning aurora! Shame about the thick clouds...

A very cool experiment in extreme laboratory plasma astrophysics!

It was great to be back at MIT PSFC! Yesterday I packed most of my old lab, ready to move to Cornell and sat on the cmte for Zhou Lou's defense, and today I gave the PSFC seminar and caught up all my colleagues. Here I am with students old and current, and some new PUFFIN stickers!

Another great fusion milestone - I had just arrived at MIT when the TFMC was tested in 2021, and now CFS has ramped up a production line to build the full-scale toroidal field magnets needed for SPARC. Very impressive engineering!

Some really interesting results from Zap! I'm a long term Z-pinch enthusiast, and these results represent a solid technical development. Now we need the physics proof that shear flow stabilisation can really enable Q>1!

I'm on the sorting committee for the APS DPP conference this year, and boy is there a lot of behind the scenes work to get talks and posters sorted into sessions. Feel free to curse me when you're sprinting back and forth across a giant conference venue to make to every talk this Fall!

Kinda interesting, but get back to me when they evolve Q-switching.

The neon calibration lamp makes our experiment look very threatening.

Here's the thing: If I added invisible text to my manuscript offering a prayer to Glykon, the serpent god of hoax deities, it would obviously have no effect on the review because Glykon does not screen manuscripts. Publishers using AI is a publisher problem. Praise Glykon.

I've seen some people say it is unethical to sneak a prompt into a manuscript sent for review. It's unclear to me how this is unethical - only those reviewers using LLMs for peer review (a deeply unethical thing to do) would fall foul to it!

Researchers have been sneaking secret messages into their papers in an effort to trick AI tools into giving them a positive peer-review report Read the full story: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Back in the lab for two weeks of experiments on COBRA with this (for now) beautiful hardware! More experiments on guide field reconnection this time with Thomson scattering measurements.

Our lab techs complain that we pay them peanuts. This is outright slander: we pay them in U.S. fancy peanuts.

Now on @sciam.bsky.social: Breakthrough results from two rival experimental reactors—the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator and the Joint European Torus tokamak—offer hope that the elusive dream of fusion power is within reach. www.scientificamerican.com/article/reco...

Requesting more free computer money to pay the computer for more plasma simulations. Maybe this time we can fix our dodgy boundary conditions!

This is a simplification; the whole process becomes much more complex when you consider the gyro motion and the gxB drift! :D

I had a quick tour this morning of the incredible space which used to house Cornell's nuclear reactor. Look at the bridge crane! The control room! The smashed concrete where the reactor used to sit!

The triple product is a flawed metric for fusion - one can't have a 100 eV plasma at higher density and get the same fusion performance as a 10 keV plasma at 100x lower density. Fusion requires high temperatures - temperature and density are not interchangeable, only density and confinement time.

This morning I toured the Cornell High Energy Synchotron Source (CHESS) with my colleagues from the Cornell Laboratory of Plasma Studies. Here we are in the control room, with a delightful range of instruments dating back to the 1960s.

This morning I toured the Cornell High Energy Synchotron Source (CHESS) with my colleagues from the Cornell Laboratory of Plasma Studies. Here we are in the control room, with a delightful range of instruments dating back to the 1960s.

This is very neat work - spontaneous plasma masers (in space?)!

Many of my magnetic reconnection simulations end up looking like demonic owls, and I'm okay with that.

An interview I did for the Michigan Institute of Plasma Science and Engineering, giving an overview of what motivates my research, and how we make and study plasmas in the laboratory! youtube.com/watch?v=yB9T...

The atomic spectral lines in this app come from the NIST atomic spectroscopy group, which has provided the world with spectroscopic measurements for 120 years. Today we got word that the federal government is laying off the entire group. 🔭🧪

It is not a fun time to be an immigrant or a lawful permanent resident in the USA.

Our latest paper is out! We studied guide field reconnection by tilting two exploding wire arrays in opposite directions. This worked, but it created a three dimensional current sheet which was tricky to diagnose with line-integrated diagnostics. pubs.aip.org/aip/pop/arti... ⚛️

And here's WHAM, the exciting high field mirror device, and the Big Red Ball, used for fundamental plasma studies. It's inspiring to see so many labs, I have lots of ideas for setting up my own.

I'm visiting UW Madison for a couple of days - where else can you find three toroidal magnetic confinement fusion devices within a few minutes walk? And tomorrow I'm off to see the WHAM mirror machine and the Big Red Ball! Pictured: HSX and MST. Pegasus III was operating, so no pictures!

Shiny load hardware makes me happy, though it won't stay that way for long! Here are two identical inductive loads as a null test for current division and current switching experiments on COBRA at Cornell. Soon we'll add some plasma, and dynamically switch current between loads in < 100 ns! #Physics

Apparently DOE is currently banned from making any awards or announcing any new calls from proposals. This is particularly frustrating as someone who has an award still pending from ten months ago. blog.researchadmin.asu.edu/wp-content/u...

They've put me on the photo board! Directly below the head of department, presumably so that she can keep a close eye on me...

I've just finished up with my first class at Cornell! I'm teaching the Plasma Diagnostics course I lectured at MIT a couple of times. As always, I polled the class to find out what sort of plasma and which diagnostics they work with. The research is different here, but the diagnostics are similar!

With a slight feeling of deja vu, I'm preparing to set up a lab for PUFFIN! We have two rooms in the basement of Rhodes Hall, a control room (left) and the main room for PUFFIN (right). They are now mostly cleared out, ready for the construction work to begin soon!

With a slight feeling of deja vu, I'm preparing to set up a lab for PUFFIN! We have two rooms in the basement of Rhodes Hall, a control room (left) and the main room for PUFFIN (right). They are now mostly cleared out, ready for the construction work to begin soon!

We propose a 2 years postdoctoral position to contribute to the code PHARE and perform the first global magnetospheres with it. Starting Oct. 2025. See details here: gist.github.com/nicolasaunai...

We're settling into our new home in Ithaca, ready for the start of the semester in Cornell. One of the best things about the area is all of the woods and wildlife - here's a curious American Kink watching us from cover in the Sapsucker Woods.

As someone who has just (through good luck) "solved" the two body problem in academia, this is a very thoughtful article.

We have a new preprint out! arxiv.org/abs/2412.02556 Led by MIT grad student Thomas Varnish on the MAIZE facility at the University of Michigan, we studied magnetic reconnection with a guide field, by (literally) adding a twist to our existing pulsed-power-driven reconnection platform!

This entire thread is good, but point 3) in the conclusions is spot on. Imagine how far we could advance exoplanetary science if we had equation of state measurements for cauliflower at GBar pressures!