HTS technology for nuclear fusion and accelerators: understanding and mitigating issues due to radiation damage

by Prof. Francesco Laviano (Politecnico di Torino)

Tuesday 25 Nov 2025, 15:00 → 17:00 Europe/Rome

C. Villi meeting room

Nowadays it is clear that high-field magnets (induction field larger than 10 T) are needed for breakthrough applications, such as high-luminosity accelerators and compact nuclear fusion reactors. The High-Temperature Superconductors (HTS) are the enabling technology for the high-field magnets, and many efforts are ongoing for improving the quality and increasing the quantity of the second generation HTS tapes, which are based on the Rare-Earth-Ba2Cu3O7-x (REBCO) HTS. However, both in next generation accelerators and in compact fusion reactors, the radiation environment could be prohibitive for HTS due to their limited radiation hardness and the lifetime of the magnets might represent a technological showstopper.
Therefore, a profound study of the radiation damage of REBCO HTS is of utmost importance. On the one hand, computational tools implemented on recent HPCs allow predicting with unprecedented details the effect of radiation on the crystal lattice, on the other hand complexity of the HTS materials, absence of suitable nuclear sources and the use of proxy radiation to experimentally validate the theoretical predictions, make this task very challenging [1].

[1] D. Torsello, G. Celentano, L. Civale, V. Corato, M. Eisterer, D. Gambino, S. Murphy, S. Speller and F. Laviano, “Roadmap for the investigation of irradiation effects in HTS for fusion", Supercond. Sci. Technol. 38 (2025) 053501