44th Annual EPS conference on Plasma Physics
The 44th Annual EPS conference on Plasma Physics was held at the Waterside Centre in Belfast, UK, from 26th to 30th June 2017, with participation by 672 researchers from 43 countries.
The 2017 Alfvén prize was presented to Professor Ksenia Aleksandrovna Razumova, from the Kurchatov Institute (Moscow, Russia), for “obtaining, for the first time, a macroscopically stable plasma column in a tokamak configuration; this led to the world-wide programme of experimental exploration and development of the tokamak concept for magnetic confinement fusion”.
The 2017 Innovation award was presented to Professor Michel Moisan, from the Université de Montréal (Québec, Canada), for “pioneering contributions to the development and understanding of microwave plasma sources and their applications to materials processing, healthcare and environmental protection”.
The 2017 PhD Research Awards for outstanding theses were presented to (in alphabetical order): Justin Ball (Oxford University, UK) for his study of the effect of plasma boundary shape on driving intrinsic rotation in the tokamak, and more generally on the confinement properties; Luca Fedeli (Pisa University, Italy) for his study of surface plasmons, which are excited by intense laser pulses at a vacuum-plasma interface; and Toon Weyens (Univ. Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, and Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands) for his study of a key aspect of toroidal plasma stability, the effects of non-axisymmetric fields on peeling-ballooning stability.
Prizes for PhD research students for work presented during the conference were awarded as follows:
- The 13th Kyushu University Itoh Project Prize was awarded to Matteo Fontana (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale, Lausanne) for his poster entitled “Turbulence measurements with the correlation electron cyclotron emission (CECE) diagnostic in TCV”. Two other students were highly commended: Nicola Bonanomi (Università di Milano-Bicocca & JET) for “Role of small-scale tubulence and multi-scale interactions in electron heat transport in JET” and Alsu Sladkomedova (Ioffe Institute) for “Impurity transport studies on the Globus-M tokamak”.
- The 2017 PPCF/EPS/IUPAP Poster Prize was awarded to (in alphabetical order): Aaron Alejo (Queen’s University, Belfast) for his poster entitled “Stabilisation of radiation pressure driven ion acceleration from ultra-thin targets, studied by fast neutron spectroscopy”; Michael Griener (Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Garching) for “Implementation of fast line ratio spectroscopy on helium as plasma edge diagnostic at ASDEX Upgrade”; Giannandrea Inchingolo (Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon) for “Large-scale PIC simulations of high β magnetorotational instability”; and Axel Jardin (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique) for “Investigation of impurity cooling factor robustness against transport for application of GEM detectors to W core density reconstruction on WEST”.
