A symphony of particles
4 Feb 2013
This four-minute video will take you into the very heart of the ITER Tokamak.
Have you ever wanted to visualize what happens inside of a tokamak?
In a spectacular new video on ITER operation produced by the National Center of Computational Sciences (located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US), you can follow high-velocity deuterium particles as they are injected into the ITER plasma.
Against a backdrop of symphonic music played by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, the particle density in the plasma begins to build, the injected particles start to collide with their lower-energy cousins, and their energy is transferred, heating the plasma and driving the plasma current. The conditions are ripe for fusion reactions, and a small Sun is created in the centre of the machine.
Produced from supercomputer simulations, the video will take you behind the walls and past the complex supporting systems for ITER, into the very heart of the fusion reaction.
Watch the video here.
"Fusion Energy Production by Deuterium Particle Injection" was funded in part by the US Department of Energy, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the National Center of Computational Sciences. (Visualization by Jamison Daniel.)