Willem Haverkort, researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) and FOM Institute for Plasma Physics Rijnhuizen was awarded the Poster Award at the Physics@FOM Veldhoven congress (18, 19 January 2011). Haverkort won the prize for his poster ‘Waves and instabilities in rotating tokamak plasmas’. His poster was selected out of 379 contributions.

The research of Haverkort focuses on the tokamak design as a means to achieve controlled nuclear fusion. A tokamak contains a large magnet, in which a hot plasma floats. For fusion, to become a viable energy source, this plasma will have to be hotter than that of the sun. A major challenge is to ensure that this plasma does not damage the surrounding walls.

The research of Haverkort is directed towards the experimental reactor ITER that will be built in France. ITER is one of the most challenging international scientific collaborations ever, with the aim to make a machine that produces energy from nuclear fusion.

Willem Haverkort is researcher in the CWI research group ‘Scientific Computing and Control Theory’
and the FOM Rijnhuizen group ‘Computational Plasma Physics - High Temperature’.