Taming the world's greatest tokamak: Diverse electrotechnical disciplines are used to probe, test, measure, and analyze a premier fusion reactor

At Princeton University's Plasma Physics Laboratory, scores of electrical and electronics engineers are applying diverse disciplines to the job at hand: advancing fusion engineering to the point where commercial electric power based on fusion reactions may one day become feasible. At the laboratory, these engineers must continually meet the challenge of designing systems to probe, test, measure, and analyze the world's most advanced operating reactor of its type. The challenge entails mastering, as well as merging, tools and techniques from fields spanning power engineering, magnetics, instrumentation, data acquisition, data processing, computers, and computer graphics.