The antecedent papers are the pre-CFS publications from which the company's magnet technology descends — two in particular, separated by eleven years, that were written before there was a company to build on them.
The first is 📝Leslie Bromberg's 2001 Fusion Engineering and Design paper with M. Tekula, L. A. El-Guebaly and R. Miller, "Options for the use of high temperature superconductor in tokamak fusion reactor designs" (DOI 10.1016/S0920-3796(00)00432-4). Its argument is that high-temperature 📝superconductors permit demountable joints in a 📝tokamak's 📝toroidal field coils at a cryogenic cost of only a few percent — the design freedom that lets a machine be opened and serviced rather than sealed for life, and the premise the 2015 📝ARC design was built on.
The second is Makoto Takayasu's work with Luisa Chiesa, Leslie Bromberg again, and Joseph V. Minervini at MIT on the twisted stacked-tape cable conductor, published in Superconductor Science and Technology in the January 2012 issue (DOI 10.1088/0953-2048/25/1/014011). Its idea is the structural ancestor of what 📝VIPER cable became: rather than treating flat 📝REBCO tape as a single conductor, stack it and twist the stack, so a cable can be bent and wound without shredding the very thin superconducting layer it depends on. That Bromberg appears on both papers is not a coincidence — a single line of thinking at MIT connects them.
Neither paper mentions a company. Both are the ordinary work of a publicly funded laboratory, and both are load-bearing — a useful thing to notice when reading a corpus otherwise dominated by a private firm's own publications.
We did not invent demountable joints or stacked-tape cable. We built a company on ideas the 📝MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center had already published, and the debt is worth stating in full.