The Columbia Fusion Research Center is Columbia University's fusion energy center, launched in April 2025 within the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science under founding director Carlos Paz-Soldan.
The center is built around breadth of sponsorship rather than a single industrial partner. It holds sponsored research agreements with more than ten private 📝fusion companies at once — 📝Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Tokamak Energy, Type One Energy, Realta Fusion, Open Star Technologies, Next Step Fusion, Kyoto Fusioneering and Maritime Fusion among those with active agreements — spanning 📝tokamaks, 📝stellarators, 📝magnetic mirrors and dipole configurations, so no one company's design point is the house position. On campus it operates the High-Beta Tokamak – Extended Pulse (HBT-EP), the Columbia Stellarator eXperiment, the Columbia University Tokamak for Education and the Collisionless Terrella Experiment; its researchers also work at 📝DIII-D and 📝NSTX-U.
That structure is what makes the group's 📝ARC work load-bearing. Eight of the thirteen authors of "ARC physics basis–📝magnetohydrodynamics" (Journal of Plasma Physics, 2026; doi:10.1017/S0022377826101421) hold Columbia affiliations, including lead author 📝Nils Leuthold and Paz-Soldan, and its conclusion that the ARC baseline scenario sits deep in the ideal 📝kink instability stable region is a modeled projection for a machine that does not yet exist. Columbia authors also carry "ARC 📝disruption physics and strategy" (doi:10.1017/S0022377826101585) and disruption-mitigation modeling for 📝SPARC. The independence is one of authorship and institution, not of funding: CFS is among the sponsors.