SULTAN is the superconductor test facility operated by the Swiss Plasma Center of EPFL on the Paul Scherrer Institute campus at Villigen, Switzerland — the bench on which full-size fusion magnet conductors are proved before anyone winds a coil from them.
It is not a 📝Tokamak but a test rig, and the distinction is the point: SULTAN measures conductors, not 📝plasmas. The name is a German contraction, Supraleiter-Testanlage, superconductor test installation. Six superconducting solenoids cooled by forced-flow supercritical helium form a split-coil arrangement producing up to 11 📝tesla across a 580-millimetre bore, into which a sample of cable is inserted and driven at currents up to the tens of kiloamps. Superimposed AC fields up to 0.8 tesla and pulsed fields up to 3 tesla let the rig reproduce the changing-field duty a 📝central solenoid or 📝poloidal field coil actually sees.
What SULTAN produces is a measured 📝critical current and its degradation — how much a conductor loses under Lorentz load, after repeated 📝cryogenic cycling, and through 📝quench-like transients. That makes it the reference facility for 📝ITER's 📝low-temperature superconductor conductors, and it has also tested cables for 📝Wendelstein 7-X, 📝EAST and the Italian DTT. A single facility of this kind, shared across programmes, is how the field keeps conductor claims comparable between organisations that otherwise share nothing.