Profile

Fusion might be the most complex and complicated engineering challenge we have ever tried to solve. We need to keep a reaction going at temperatures a good deal greater than the core of the sun, and for that we need magnets that need to be cooled down to almost absolute zero (the coldest anything can be).  For the reaction to keep going we need fuel, and that’s where I come in. To fuel the reaction, we need two isotopes (basically, other forms of the same element with different atomic masses) of hydrogen: one is called deuterium and can be found pretty much everywhere, the other is called tritium and is very unstable so we need to make it on site (or as we usually say in-situ). The materials I study are capable of making this unstable isotope under the conditions directly outside where the main reaction is happening. Basically, this reaction makes an insane amount of neutrons (and energy!), and my materials break down, thanks to these neutrons, into tritium (and some helium that we need to remove).