Helion's HERCULES program: External funding for fusion research

📢 Announcing HERCULES! Helion is strengthening its research collaborations with universities, national labs, and private companies through its new program, HERCULES, accelerating innovations to bring fusion generators to market faster and at scale! ⚡

This is a great initiative Michael! Large-scale fusion challenges are far beyond the capabilities of any single company to solve alone. History has shown this clearly when the U.S., Russia, the U.K., and Europe realized in the late 1950s that plasma and fusion research required international collaboration, they declassified much of their fusion research to accelerate progress. It’s inspiring to see Helion taking a similar collaborative approach to drive the next era of fusion innovation.

The world's largest full-ion accelerator, the High Intensity heavy-ion Accelerator Facility (#HIAF), completed beam commissioning during testing on Tuesday in south China's #Guangdong Province, according to the Institute of Modern Physics (#IMP) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Located in Guangdong's Huizhou City, the HIAF is a major national sci-tech infrastructure project led by the IMP. Construction began in December 2018, with over 6,000 large-scale pieces of equipment, nearly 5 million components, and a total pipeline length exceeding 1 million meters. https://lnkd.in/ganQx86a

We’re pleased to report the successful testing of a full prototype of our new high temperature neutron flux detector. We have designed this detector for next generation reactors operating at high temperature, such as molten salt reactors. It could also support fusion plants or space applications. Test reactor results show our device will operate from room temperature up to 1470°F (800°C) across ten orders of magnitude of neutron flux in a reactor operating from start-up to full power. Further testing is in progress, to continue characterizing this new product. 📷: Bradley Campbell, Nucleonics Engineering Manager, and Chris Laidler, Senior Physicist, who is leading a high temperature neutron flux detector development project

Chemistry World, a magazine published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the UK, says its piece on ANSTO's proposed cuts to the science program at the Australian Synchrotron in Melbourne. https://lnkd.in/eQWQUPBT #synchrotrons #science #research #chemistry

🇨🇳 China built a 2 MW thorium-based molten salt reactor (TMSR) in the Gobi Desert after 15 years of research. Developed by the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, it’s the first reactor to convert thorium into uranium successfully. The project began in 2011, inspired by 1960s declassified US molten salt research. Chief scientist Xu Hongjie said his team mastered and implemented the earlier US technology. A larger 10 MW thorium reactor is already under development. TMSR tech uses no water cooling, reduces radioactive waste, and enhances fuel efficiency, advancing China’s clean, self-reliant energy goals. #China

✨ 𝐀 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐫𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐇𝐢𝐠𝐠𝐬-𝐛𝐨𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬! I’m excited to share our new paper, just published in JHEP, reporting the first dedicated search for the production of a Higgs boson together with a single top quark (tH) by the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN, using the full Run-2 dataset (140 fb⁻¹) of proton–proton collisions at √s = 13 TeV. By combining several Higgs-boson decay channels (H→bb, WW*, ZZ*, and ττ) and applying advanced deep-learning techniques, we improved the sensitivity to this extremely rare process, which provides new insight into how the Higgs boson interacts with the top quark. The results show a small excess of events over Standard Model expectations, a 2.8σ effect. This certainly calls for further investigation with larger datasets, an exciting prospect for future LHC runs! 👀 🔗 JHEP 10 (2025) 093 — https://lnkd.in/dKSAuAWE This work has been made possible thanks to the dedication of colleagues from Instituto de Física Corpuscular (IFIC), The University of Manchester, INFN, Sapienza Università di Roma, Shandong University, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, the Czech Technical University in Prague, and the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. A truly international collaboration that shows how science brings people together to build a better, more connected world 🌍. #ATLASexperiment #CERN #HiggsBoson #TopPhysics #tH #JHEP #ParticlePhysics #HEP

Tech in history by Roberto Capodieci Darmstadtium's Atomic Debut On November 9, 1994, a team led by Peter Armbruster and Sigurd Hofmann at the GSI in Darmstadt, Germany, synthesized darmstadtium by fusing nickel-62 with lead-208 in a heavy-ion accelerator, detecting four atoms of the new element 110. This achievement intertwined advanced accelerator tech with the politics of global scientific cooperation in the 1990s, as competing labs in the U.S. and Russia vied for superheavy element claims, emphasizing verification amid naming disputes. Quirky for its extreme instability, decaying in microseconds, darmstadtium's discovery overcame flops like low fusion probabilities, requiring billions of collisions over days, and honored its birthplace by expanding chemistry's frontiers. The element's isotopes, like Ds-281 with a 14-second half-life, provided insights into nuclear stability islands, influencing theories on heavier elements and retro tech like linear accelerators that evolved from particle physics pioneers. Beyond lab curiosity, it highlighted innovation in transactinide research, making nerds grin at how smashing atoms unlocks universe secrets, paving the way for elements up to 118 and potential applications in advanced materials. How does element discovery excite your inner scientist? Reply with your views! #TechHistory #Innovation #RetroTech #TechMilestones #TechNews

🚀🚀🚀Exciting Research Update! I am pleased to share that our U.S. Patent Application (No. 63/858,756) titled “Method for Determination of Liquid Diffusivity in Porous Materials Using Single-Sided Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (SS-NMR)” has been officially filed. This method introduces a novel approach to quantifying liquid diffusivity in porous materials using a Single-Sided NMR (SS-NMR) sensor, enabling non-destructive, high-resolution monitoring of liquid transport processes in real time. 🔍🔍🔍In summary, the method enables: - Partial immersion of the sample and real-time scanning of signal intensities at defined depths and times. - Conversion of NMR signal data into liquid content profiles to determine diffusivity as a function of moisture content. - Automated data processing through regression-based modeling and transformation techniques (e.g., Boltzmann transformation). - Application of the derived diffusivity values in hygrothermal simulations and material performance prediction. This development provides a powerful analytical tool for researchers and engineers studying moisture transport and durability in porous building materials, including concrete, hempcrete, and building envelope materials. The development of the methodology took about 2 years of research that was initially supported by the Climate Resilient Built Environment (CRBE) https://lnkd.in/gQpdrJj3 initiative and later continued under the Platform to Decarbonize the Construction Sector at Scale https://lnkd.in/gRw_yM4r at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). 🌱🌱🌱I would like to sincerely thank my colleagues and collaborators for their valuable contributions throughout this project. Mohammad Hossein Yari, Marzieh Riahinezhad, Itzel Lopez-Carreon, Peter Collins, Lin Wang, Maurice Defo, Ph.D., PMP, National Research Council Canada / Conseil national de recherches Canada 💡💡💡Stay tuned for upcoming publications detailing the experimental validation and applications of this method. #Research #Innovation #MaterialScience #NMR #BuildingScience #MoistureTransport #PorousMaterials #Patent #Sustainability #BuildingDurabilityResiliency #BDR #NRC #Decarbonizationplatform #CRBE #LCBE

I’m thrilled to share that I’m a co-author on the paper “Horn Location Sensors for LBNF” published in Nuclear Instruments & Methods in Physics Research Section A (2025). This work, led by Sudeshna Ganguly, details a novel sweep-tracker interferometer approach for correcting laser non-linearities in wavelength and scan rate, boosting calibration fidelity for large-scale instrumentation. Go ahead and give it a read!: https://lnkd.in/gYekUbnP TL;DR: target and horn alignment to the incident proton beam is very important for reliable neutrino production :)