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The Plasma Research Laboratory

The Plasma Research Laboratory is one of the seven Departments which make up the Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering at the ANU.

The Plasma Research Laboratory (PRL) conducts research into the physics of ionised gases-plasmas which make up stars and the upper atmosphere of the earth and are also important in applications such as fusion power lighting and industrial processing of materials.

PRL is organised into two research groups, the Toroidal Plasma Group and the Space Plasma Group.

The Toroidal Plasma (Toro) Group's research interests centre on the H-1 National Plasma Fusion Research Facility, a large helical axis stellarator (heliac) experiment on the fundamental physics of plasma confinement for the production of fusion energy, which has significant potential for electricity production with low radioactive waste and greenhouse gas emissions.

The Space Plasma and Plasma Processing (SP3) Group conducts research on basic plasma physics, especially wave-plasma interactions, the physics of plasmas in space, and the use of plasmas to process modern electronic materials.

The two groups also work together in a number of project areas, such as the production and heating of plasmas in H-1 using helicon wave technique and studies of plasma ion distributions during radio-frequency plasma heating.

In collaboration with the ANU Supercomputer Facility, PRL has also developed a "walk in" virtual reality environment, the WEDGE which is used to visualise plasma dynamics in the H-1 heliac as well as a range of other data.

The strongly multi-disciplinary character of plasma physics research provides many opportunities for students to develop expertise in a variety of science and technology areas other than plasma physics itself. These include precision instrumentation and control, laser and microwave, and radio-frequency technology, digital signal processing, thin-film technology, telecomm-unications, and numerical simulation and data visualisation.

The Laboratory also has close links with The Energetically Open Systems Group in the Department of Theoretical Physics.

Much more information about The Plasma Research Laboratory, is available on the Department's own web pages and The Space Plasma Group's pages