Borrowing inspiration from the movie Terminator 2, Yufan Xu, an associate research physicist specializing in liquid metals in the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s Tokamak Experimental Science Department, argues that liquid metal can be an ideal material to protect the interior walls of doughnut-shaped fusion devices known as tokamaks. Much like the T-1000’s ability to change shape and self repair, Xu notes that liquid lithium has the ability to conduct heat and aid the fusion process. Xu is the first place winner of PPPL’s second annual Research SLAM, which challenged early-career fusion scientists to explain complex plasma science to a general audience in just three minutes.
