A TASS release profiles a new scientific center, the National Center for Physics and Mathematics (NCPM) in the city of Sarov in the region of Nizhny Novgorod. The Center works closely with Rosatom, and is doing work on thermonuclear fusion. While the mass media are profiling those scientists and engineers who are leaving the country for political or economic reasons, there is a clear push to upgrade Russia’s scientific capabilities, and the cooperation with China is also key to this. One should keep in mind that, during the time of the Soviet Union, Russia was the leading scientific center in laser technology and fusion. The tokamak, still a workhorse of the fusion program, was developed by the Kurchatov Institute. These capabilities and fonts of knowledge have never been entirely lost, and are now being rebuilt as the key to Russia’s economic revival.
TASS reports that they conducted an experiment at NCPM in which, for the first time anywhere in the world, the parameters of compressibility, brightness, temperature and mass velocity of a non-ideal helium plasma at a pressure of 2 million atmospheres were simultaneously recorded. This fundamental information about the properties of helium is necessary for more accurate modeling of new and/or promising inertial-controlled thermonuclear devices.
