Status of the Tokamak in Physics at Utah State

It was nearly a year ago that the work on reassembling the tokamak STOR-1M received from University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon began. The last consignment of various parts was received in September of 2006, which contained important parts like all the big capacitors, ignitrons, trigger circuits etc. We had to design and assemble a new vacuum system. We obtained our  first plasma breakdown in the device somewhere around end of April. Although the plasma was very short lived <500 microsecond and we could not measure any appreciable plasma current, it was a morale boosting event. This showed that all the work performed in last year or so was slowly but surely progressing in the right direction (meaning over 1000 connections made were mostly correct) About a month ago we obtained plasma discharges with about 5kA plasma current lasting for about 5 ms. These are the parameters on which the device operated before decommissioning 15 years ago.

In this talk I will walk you through the entire procedure of obtaining the plasma discharge and some of the measurements we have been able to perform to date. For the benefit of students, I will first introduce what a Tokamak is and why we want it.