Question: What did you use to heat up the Hydrogen gas up to 100 million degrees?

Tom Nicholas answered on 22 Jun 2017:

Good question. There are essentially 3 methods we use:

1) Ohmic or resistive heating. Plasmas can act like wires, and we create a really strong current within our plasma. Like a wire, the plasma has a resistance, and so by keeping this current going we heat up the plasma like a resistor, or light bulb filament heats up. However as the plasma gets hotter and hotter, it gets better at conducting electric current, so the heating from this method gets slower, and we need to use other methods.

2) Cyclotron resonance heating. This is essentially microwaving the plasma really hard! Like in a microwave oven in your kitchen, we fire microwaves into the plasma, and they wiggle electrons back and forth, heating them up more and more.

3) Neutral beam injection. This is where we use particle accelerators to fire streams of fast particles of gas at the plasma. When these particles collide with the particles in the plasma, they give them heat energy.