China’s “artificial sun” set a world record on Wednesday night by generating and maintaining extremely hot, highly confined plasma for nearly seven minutes.
The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) in the city of Hefei in eastern China generated and sustained plasma for 403 seconds, breaking its previous record of 101 seconds in 2017 and marking another key step towards building high-efficiency, low-cost thermonuclear fusion reactors.
“The main significance of this new breakthrough lies in its ‘high-confinement mode’, under which the temperature and density of the plasma increase significantly,” said Song Yuntao, director of the Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which built EAST.
Read More at https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3216916/chinas-artificial-sun-breaks-record-marking-latest-milestone-quest-efficient-thermonuclear-fusion