First A3 Seminar Held in Japan

The first seminar of Asia 3 Foresight Program on Key Issues of High Performance Plasma Sustainment (A3 program) was held at Hokkaido, Japan, from January 22 - 25 2013. Altogether 37 participants from Japan, Korea and China attended this meeting, and among them 10 are from Korea, 13 from China, 14 from Japan.

Opened by Professor S. Morita and Professor J. Li, the seminar reported the recent progress of the A3 program on 3 categories: (I) Steady state sustainment of magnetic configurations, (II) Edge and divertor plasma control, (III) Confinement of alpha particles. Altogether 28 presentations were given during the 4-day meeting.

In the last day of the meeting, participants proposed future collaboration on physics studies, and put forward and discussed plans for personnel exchange and preparation of hardware construction of diagnostics and heating devices. At the same time, the management and personnel exchange of A3 in individual party were also introduced and discussed. Three collaborating parties agreed that cooperation between management is equally important as that between scientists.

Professor Liqun Hu closed the meeting by summarizing this seminar, and announced that the 2nd seminar meeting will take place in China this May. (Liu Yong reports)

About A3 program

A3 program is jointly funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NFFC), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and National Research Foundation of Korea (NFR), who jointly support two projects each year.