· Nuclear & Particle Physics
How Does a Tokamak Work? Fusion in a Magnetic Bottle
To fuse hydrogen on Earth you need a gas at well over 100 million degrees, and no material wall can touch it. A tokamak solves this with a doughnut of twisted magnetic field. Here is how the fields are built, what the Lawson criterion demands, and what JET, ITER and NIF have actually achieved.