Erica Salazar is an 🏷️#engineer and Senior Manager of Magnet Systems at 📝Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and first author of the 2021 Superconductor Science and Technology paper that demonstrated fiber-optic 📝quench detection on full-scale 📝VIPER cable at the 📝SULTAN facility. Her subject is 📝quench protection for 📝high-temperature superconducting magnets: knowing that a 📝superconductor has gone normal early enough to dump the stored energy before the coil damages itself.

The measurement was made on real hardware. Voltage-based quench detection degrades in the electromagnetic noise of a fusion device, so two optical schemes — discrete 📝fiber Bragg gratings and ultra-long gratings, a form of 📝distributed fiber-optic sensing — were embedded in two VIPER cables and driven to heater-induced quench initiation at 10.9 📝tesla, 10 to 20 kelvin, carrying 31.5 to 45.6 kiloamps. The fibers resolved temperature excursions of a few kelvin at signal-to-noise ratios of 4 to 32; the paper also reports the limit, that strain sensitivity dominated thermal sensitivity under the conditions SULTAN could reach. Salazar's later work attacks the fibers' own vulnerability, measuring and reversing radiation-induced attenuation by optical annealing and photobleaching — a 📝radiation hardening problem for any sensor living beside a 📝burning plasma. She spent five years at 📝General Atomics on 📝ITER 📝central solenoid magnet manufacturing before her doctorate at the 📝MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center under 📝Zachary Hartwig.