FusEdWeb | Fusion Education

Fusion Education Resources for Undergraduates and Graduate Students

This page is a compilation of online and offline education resources for physics and engineering students who are interested in learning more about fusion, including:

Training to do Fusion Research,
Introductory Textbooks,
Advanced Textbooks,
Summer Research Internship Programs,
Career Options in Plasma Physics and Fusion, and
Graduate Programs relating to Fusion Energy

Training to do Fusion Research

Question: "I'm an undergraduate interested in becoming a "fusioneer". What should I study?": Fusion researchers come to the field from a number of different disciplines. So far as I know, no school has a specific major in "fusioneering" or "plasma physics". For undergraduates, a major in physics, astrophysics, or electrical engineering would provide perhaps the best background for studying plasma physics. Nuclear and mechanical engineering are also viable options, especially if your interest lies more in reactor design and engineering. At this point the majority of Ph.D. opportunities are on the plasma physics side, though this may change as the science evolves and (we hope) more reactor engineers are needed.
Aside from choosing a suitable major (and succeeding in it), it is often extremely helpful to do some summer (or school-year) research in areas relevant to fusion and plasma physics. More information on internship opportunities is given below.

Introductory Level Books

Intended for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students.

Chen, Francis F.: _Introduction to Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, Volume 1: Plasma Physics_, 2nd edition. Plenum Press, New York, 1984.
Dendy, Richard, ed.: _Plasma Physics: an Introductory Course_, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Goldston, R.J. and Rutherford, P.H.: _Introduction to Plasma Physics_, Institute of Physics Publishing, Philadelphia, 1995. (ISBN #'s: 0 7503 0325 5 (hardcover), or 0 7503 0183 X (paperback)
Gross, Robert A.: _Fusion Energy_, Wiley & Sons, New York, 1984.
Stacey, Weston M, Jr.: _Fusion: An Introduction to the Physics and Technology of Magnetic Confinement Fusion_, Wiley & Sons, New York, 1984.

Advanced Textbooks

These are mostly graduate-level textbooks.

Davidson, Ronald C.: _Physics of Nonneutral Plasmas_, Addison-Wesley, Redwood City, CA, 1990.
Duderstadt, James J., and Moses, Gregory A.: _Inertial Confinement Fusion_, Wiley & Sons, New York, 1982.
Friedberg, Jeffrey P.: _Ideal Magnetohydrodynamics_, Plenum Press, New York, 1987.
Hazeltine, R.D. and Meiss, J.D.: _Plasma Confinement_. Addison-Wesley, Redwood City, CA, 1992.
Horton, W. and Ichikawa, Y.-H.: _Chaos and Structures in Nonlinear Plasmas_. World Scientific, 1996.
Hutchinson, Ian H.: _Principles of Plasma Diagnostics_, Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Miyamoto, Kenro.: _Plasma Physics for Nuclear Fusion_, revised English language edition. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989.
Nicholson, Dwight R.: _Introduction to Plasma Theory_, Krieger Publishing Co., Malabar, FL, 1992.
Parks, George K.: _Physics of Space Plasmas: an Introduction_, Addison-Wesley, Redwood City, CA, 1991.
Roth, J. Reece.: _Introduction to Fusion Energy_, Ibis Publishing, Charlottesville, VA, 1986.
Stacey, Weston M.: _Fusion Plasma Analysis_, Wiley-Interscience, New York, 1981. ISBN 0-471-08095-0
Stix, Thomas Howard.: _Waves in Plasmas_, American Institute of Physics, New York, 1992.
Wesson, John.: _Tokamaks_, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987.
White, Roscoe B.: _Theory of Tokamak Plasmas_, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1989.
Yamanaka, C.: _Introduction to Laser Fusion_, Harwood Academic Publishers, Chur, Switzerland, 1991.

Summer Internships

National Undergraduate Fellowship Program (U.S.)
Energy Research Undergraduate Laboratory Fellowships (U.S.)
Culham Summer School (Global; held near Oxford, England)
Sandia, Livermore, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and other National Laboratories also have research internship programs, which can involve plasma/fusion research.
Many universities which do plasma and fusion research will have summer internships. Any university with a plasma or fusion graduate program (ses list below) is a possibility, but others abound as well. Even if no formal program exists, you can succeed by taking the initiative and contacting the professors yourself.
If you know of other programs, please email Robert Heeter!

Employment

What kind of job opportunities are there in plasma physics and fusion research?

Plasma physics is a really broad field, both in terms of scientific content and the types of jobs one can find. If you want to get your Ph.D. and go on to be a professional physicist, then there are jobs in universities, national laboratories, and industry. You can also take a master's degree and go straight to industry, or skip grad school altogether and work as a technician or engineer in a national lab or industry. My own expertise is in the U.S. job market, so I will focus on that. I'd love to hear details from overseas, though.

Before going into detail on plasma physics opportunities, it is worth pointing out some general resources for physicists looking for jobs. Perhaps the best source of statistical information is the American Institute of Physics, www.aip.org. In addition a bit of web surfing will find a large number of sites with scientific job postings on them. But the best way to find a good job is to meet and get to know people who do the types of things you like to do.

The trouble with careers in research science are that the system as a whole is a bit of a pyramid scheme. For instance, the number of graduate students is far more than that needed to replace the tenured professors who produce them, and more even than that needed to replace retiring senior researchers in government and industry. The number of undergraduates is also much larger than the number of graduate students. And it is easier to finish your Ph.D. and get a post-doc than to land even a tenure-track "potentially permanent" position (let alone get tenure). But although it is difficult to get high-quality tenured faculty positions or permanent staff positions, fortunately that is not the only way to be successful as a physicist. Physicists are talented people who can do all sorts of things not envisioned in the traditional career system, including earning obscene amounts of money on Wall Street or leading new high-tech enterprises. And the AIP stats show that over the long run, on average people with physics bachelors degrees will out-earn most engineers, liberal arts majors, and so on.

But most of us who go into science want to be researchers, so let's return to opportunities in traditional research careers. On the academic side, there are a number of universities with large groups of plasma physicists (see the Web pages at http://FusEdWeb.pppl.gov for a partial listing). Most of the national labs have plasma groups (and PPPL is an all-plasmas laboratory). I'm not as familiar with industry but I know that plasmas are widely used in semiconductor fabrication and in a number of other manufacturing businesses. (The University of Wisconsin has a leading center for studying industrial plasma applications, so you might surf over to their site and check that out.) Plasma physicists can be found studying astrophysical plasmas (stellar cores, nebulas, accretion disks), fusion plasmas (for fusion energy by either magnetic or inertial confinement), non-neutral plasmas, particle beam plasmas, antimatter plasmas, space plasmas (the earth's magnetosphere and the solar wind), and more down-to-earth plasmas used in industry. (Plasmas are used for all sorts of manufacturing processes, from putting coatings onto plastics and cars to etching the chips used inside the computer that you're viewing this message on. The fluorescent bulbs that are probably in a ceiling nearby are also plasma devices.)

The way I found my own job (down at the postdoc level) was to go to a conference put on by the Division of Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society. They had a "Job Center" there where you could put in a one-page resume that would be scanned by recruiters; meanwhile there were a lot of job offerings posted on bulletin boards. There was a message service so employers and job-hunters could communicate their interest and set up short 15-30 minute mini-interviews. I wound up with a few good conversations (and some not-so-good ones), and learned a lot about what was available by reading the bulletin boards. There were a lot of postdocs available and a few - not many - permanent positions.

The APS-DPP meeting leans towards fusion research, but there are other conferences for other areas of plasma physics (ICOPS is a big one), and they also have ways of hooking up employers and employees. Any conference provides a chance to network, so at a minimum if you're willing to put yourself out there and talk to people, you can learn quite a bit. At present it sounds like it's relatively easy to get a job in semiconductor manufacturing, and it's also easy to get postdocs in all the other branches of plasma physics, but landing a permanent spot in pure research remains difficult. One suggestion if you are willing to change fields is to track the funding allocations given to the various scientific programs by Congress, and choose one that has a recent history of growth; they'll be hiring. If growth has been minimal or negative in recent years there may be postdocs (the powers that be don't want the pipeline to dry up if budgets start to increase again) but permanent positions may be scarce.

Finally, it's important to recognize that there are cycles (chaotic perhaps) and so by the time you finish school the market could be completely different from what it is now. However, if you keep your wits about you and aim your academic career to give you a good scientific background plus a nice basket of marketable technical skills, you should not have too much trouble finding something interesting to work on. But the days when physicists could work on absolutely anything they found interesting are generally gone, so you might someday have to make a tough choice between chasing a dream and chasing a steady paycheck.

Graduate Programs - United States

See the Fusion Sites listing, and go to the section on Universities.

See also the List of Programs maintained by the University Fusion Association (UFA).

Graduate Programs - Outside the U.S.