Good things always come in pairs.
Two reactors, two cities, two countries, two hydrogen atoms. After my internship in Italy, I had the honor of visiting two of the world’s leading physics research centers in Switzerland: EPFL’s Swiss Plasma Center in Lausanne and CERN in Geneva.
EPFL, Lausanne
At EPFL’s campus in Lausanne, I toured the Swiss Plasma Center, home of the TCV tokamak, where I learned how plasma behaves and how best to shape it. Understanding how hydrogen isotopes behave at these extreme temperatures is one of many steps toward achieving nuclear fusion.
CERN, Geneva
In Geneva, I toured CERN’s particle accelerator complex, most famously the Large Hadron Collider, which smashes protons together at near-light speeds to study the fundamental particles and forces of the universe, such as the Higgs boson. It was so cool to see, in person, the concepts I had only read about in textbooks, at the very facilities where they were discovered.
Nuclear fusion is still a field with much left to uncover, and I hope to contribute to it in the future.
