I'm planning on applying to plasma physics programs across the US (US citizen) and I'm aware of the big name schools in this area: MIT, Princeton, etc. I would like to study fusion - specifically tokamaks - and am somewhat open to theory/experimental (have a small amount of computational experience). My question is: as I survey the landscape, it doesn't seem like many study tokamak-based fusion. I've found MIT and Princeton, and it seems like the others that have specialties in fusion (example: UW Madison) seem to be focused on alternative approaches to fusion - not to mention some of them are just hard to find info about due to poor/not updated web pages.
My ideal would be MIT (I've watched several of their products on fusion and am convinced that the tokamak is the way forward, based on my very limited knowledge, of course) with Princeton being a close second. I like the concept of the ARC/SPARC, and I think I would find it hard to work with "alternative" approaches that appear to be several orders of magnitude behind the tokamak in terms of density, heat, pressure, whatever. (Yes, I know, I 'drank the cool-aid'
)My question is: how would I go about finding out who studies tokamaks without contacting every institution individually? Are there any good approaches that would be revealing of the quality of a program in this specific area? Does anyone here have any info?
Thanks a lot!
