Dr. Dan Brunner is presenting at the Postdoc Seminar Series on April 15th. His presentation is titled “The heat flux problem in fusion reactors”.
BIO: Dr. Brunner obtained his PhD at MIT in the Nuclear Science and Engineering Department. His research focused on the development of probes for the boundary plasma of the Plamsa Science and Fusion Center’s magnetic confinement fusion experiment Alcator C-Mod. The probes he developed survived heat fluxes 20 times greater than on the surface of the sun and measured plasma temperatures up to 2 million degress Celsius. With them he explored fundamental physics of heat transport of boundary plasmas in fusion reactors. After graduation, he ran off to a job in the Netherlands working on hitting tiny drops of tin with very large lasers to make a plasma-based light source for photolithography. Most of the work was towards making the flash brighter and less tin go everywhere. But the 40 days of vacation per year, excellent bicycle infrastructure, and always happy Dutch people were not for him, so he returned to MIT for a postdoc. A major focus of his postdoctoral research will be working to find a “reactor-relevant” solution to the heat flux problem in fusion reactors.