SPARC as a platform to advance tokamak science is the 2023 Physics of Plasmas paper in which 📝Alex Creely and six co-authors argue that 📝SPARC's experimental data should be worked on by researchers well beyond the two organizations building the machine.
SPARC is a compact, high-field 📝tokamak under construction in Devens, Massachusetts, and is predicted to reach 📝burning plasma conditions once it operates. Nothing in the paper is a result. Its premise is that a machine of that kind will generate scientific value in excess of what its builders need from it, and that the excess is forfeited if access stops at the company that owns the tokamak.
The domains it names are the ones where SPARC's parameters are unusual rather than incremental: confinement and stability at high magnetic field and high density, burning plasma physics, 📝disruption physics, and boundary physics and heat-flux management under power-plant-relevant conditions. The SPARC team is already a hybrid of 📝Commonwealth Fusion Systems and the 📝MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center; six of the seven authors — Creely, 📝Dan Brunner, 📝Bob Mumgaard, 📝Matt Reinke, Michael Segal and 📝Brandon Sorbom — write from CFS, and 📝Martin Greenwald writes from MIT. The paper treats that arrangement as a starting point rather than a boundary. Read against 📝The Role of Peer Review in Commercial Fusion, it is the operational half of one argument: peer review governs what a private company publishes, and this paper governs who gets to work with what it measures.
SPARC is our machine, but a burning plasma is a question the whole field has been asking for fifty years. This paper is us saying, in advance of first plasma, that the data should not stop at our door.