Columbia Fusion Research Center

University

Projects: 5 Jobs: 2

fusion.columbia.edu

Founding Year

2025

Location

United States flag North Bergen, New Jersey, United States

Columbia University’s plasma and fusion program, active since 1961, has graduated over 160 doctoral students working across the fusion energy sector and related industries. The program currently includes more than 30 PhD students and provides training to undergraduate students in plasma physics and fusion technology. In 2025, Columbia established the Columbia Fusion Research Center to support industry-aligned research and workforce development for the fusion energy sector

Projects

CSX

Description

The Columbia Stellarator eXperiment (CSX) is a superconducting, quasi-symmetric stellarator. It is being built to test novel stellarator geometries and their intersection with high-temperature superconducting magnet technologies. It is being repurposed from the Columbia Non-neutral Torus (CNT).

CUTE

Description

The Columbia University Tokamak for Education (CUTE) is a flexible low-aspect ratio tokamak. Previously HIT-II at the University of Washington, it is now being refurbished for use in education focused tokamak research

Collisionless Terrella Experiment

Description

The collisionless terrella experiment is a device to understand the basic principles of collisionless transport of energetic plasma in planetary magnetospheres and to identify mechanisms causing charged particle energization and flux modulations.

HBT-EP

1993 - Present

Description

HBT-EP is an experiment for the investigation of wall-stabilization. It investigates the combined use of a close-fitting conducting wall and modular saddle coils for the purpose of significantly extending the tokamak beta limit

NSF NTT

Description

The NSF Negative Triangularity Tokamak (NSF NTT) project, developed in collaboration with Columbia Engineering, aimed to advance through all stages of a negative triangularity tokamak design for testing NT plasmas and plasma control solutions. The project reached full pre-conceptual design before being put on hold.