Imagine controlling a mini sun 🔥 inside a doughnut-shaped device! That’s the dream of fusion energy, which could one day power our world with zero carbon emissions. Fusion works by smashing light atoms together, just like in the heart of the sun, to unleash massive energy.
But here’s the catch: keeping super-hot plasma stable long enough to get more energy out than you put in is a huge challenge. Traditional control relies on complex physics models that need tons of computing power and time to get right.
Enter a game-changing AI model developed by researchers from the Southwestern Institute of Physics in the Chinese mainland, Zhejiang University and Zhejiang Lab. They trained a smart system entirely on experimental data from the HL-3 tokamak, the Chinese mainland’s most advanced fusion device. Using LSTM networks, self-attention and scheduled sampling, the AI can predict how plasma currents and shapes evolve—avoiding the error buildup that slows down old-school simulators.
Even cooler? The team hooked the AI into the real plasma control system of the HL-3, and it stayed rock-solid under unexpected conditions. This "zero-shot" generalization shows the model can adapt on the fly without extra training.
Why does this matter for us? Faster, more efficient AI controllers could accelerate experiments at giants like ITER and pave the way for commercial fusion reactors. We might be a giant leap closer to a clean energy future! 🚀
Reference(s):
cgtn.com
