Alcator C-Mod
| Type | Tokamak |
|---|---|
| Operation date | 1991–2016 |
| Size (Major radius/Minor Radius | 0.68 m/0.22 m |
| Plasma volume | 1 m3 |
| Magnetic field | 3–8 T (toroidal) |
| Plasma current | 0.4–2.0 MA (typical) |
| Location | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA |
Alcator C-Mod was a tokamak, a magnetically confined nuclear fusion device, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). In 2016 it achieved the highest yet magnetic field strength and highest plasma pressure, which is notable because it does not use superconducting magnets. It was one of the major fusion research facilities in the United States.
Operating between 1993 and 2016, it was the third of the Alcator (Alto Campo Toro, High Field Torus) tokamak series, following Alcator A (1973–1979) and Alcator C (1978–1987). It was the largest fusion reactor operated by any university and was an integral part of the larger Plasma Science and Fusion Center.
In the late 1960s, magnetic-confinement fusion research at MIT was carried out on small-scale "table-top" experiments at the Research Laboratory for Electronics and the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory. At this time, the Soviet Union was developing a tokamak (though this was unknown in the United States), and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) was developing the stellarator.
Bruno Coppi was working at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and was interested in the basic plasma physics problem of plasma resistivity at high values of the streaming parameter, as well as the behavior of magnetically confined plasmas at very high field strengths (≥ 10 T). In 1968, Coppi attended the third IAEA International Conference on Plasma Physics and Controlled Nuclear Fusion Research at Novosibirsk. At this conference, Soviet scientists announced that they had achieved electron temperatures of over 1000 eV in a tokamak device (T-3).
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