Event: Institutskolloquium Datum: 16.06.2023 Uhrzeit: 10:30 - 12:00 Ort: IPP Greifswald Raum: Günter-Grieger Lecture Hall (Greifswald) and Zoom Gastgeber: Dmitry Moseev Kontakt: [email protected] Vortragender: Dr. Francesco Sciortino Francesco is a co-founder and CEO of Proxima Fusion, a startup headquartered in Munich working on QI stellarators. Following his undergraduate studies at Imperial College and EPFL, Francesco did his PhD at MIT, working on spectroscopy and particle transport in tokamaks. He then joined IPP to do research on divertor spectroscopy and reduced edge modeling at ASDEX Upgrade. In 2022, he was one of the EuroFusion Scientific Coordinators for negative triangularity, considered a potential path to tokamak power plants. In January 2023, Francesco and his co-founders co-founded Proxima Fusion to pursue a new path with public-private partnerships to develop QI stellarators in Europe. In recent years, progress in stellarator physics and technology has led to a re-assessment of opportunities within the domain of magnetic confinement devices. In particular, QI stellarators are now recognized by many as offering the clearest and most robust path to fusion energy, building on the groundbreaking work done at W7-X. Proxima Fusion is a startup based in Munich, co-founded by a group of former employees of the Max Planck IPP. Proxima was created to complement IPP, developing a stellarator reactor program with an “engineering-first” approach. In this presentation, the first phase of operation of Proxima will be described, together with its objectives for cooperation with IPP.