Master’s programme Large facilities – Plasmas, Lasers, Accelerators, Tokamaks (GI-PLATO)

For the 2022-2023 academic year, the students will originate as well from the Erasmus Mundus Consortium Lascala (Large scale Accelerators and lasers), granted by European Commission in Summer 2020 and joining three European universities University La Sapienza (Italy), University of Szeged (Hungaria), University of Lund (Sweden) and University Paris-Saclay (coordinator).

To this end, they will benefit from substantial experimental work sessions (about 100 hours per student) carried out directly at the major facilities located within the Paris-Saclay area. These include the Synchrotron SOLEIL, the proton therapy center at Orsay, the high power lasers of the LULI, LOA, LASERIX, and IOGS laboratories, and the PHIL (IJCLab) and IPHI (IRFU) devices. In addition to this concrete discovery of the major scientific equipments, there will be visits to the European laboratories CERN, LMJ and ITER.

Particular emphasis will be placed on the managerial aspects of managing large projects and facilities: a specific course will be devoted to project management, safety standards for construction and operation, and user reception, for example.

Finally, the 5-6-month internship, compatible with the format of an engineer school end-of-study internship, and carried out at a large research facility or at a partner industrial company, completes this training. Some students will then be able to undertake a doctorate while others will go directly to project management or maintenance positions in large facilities as research engineers in public or private organizations, or in private companies.
The courses will be given by engineers, researchers and teacher-researchers who are recognized specialists in their field and actors in large research facilities.

Aware of the close links between the techniques used in fusion and for accelerators, the Master’s program GI-PLATO has the teaching goal to train versatile people with a wall-balanced teaching, as proposed by the Grandes Ecoles of the Plateau of Saclay, tackling fundamental physics and applied physics, physics and engineering, and aiming at giving thorough skills on the whole spectrum of activities all interconnected as represented below. The training is focussed on students who plan to be either research physicists or physics engineers, or future theoretician familiar with the methods for controlling experiments, and conversely, to train specialized physicists who are familiar with instrumentation and the stakes of their measurements. Bringing together Universities and Grandes Ecoles and the INSTN institute of CEA, a national organization strongly involved by its original DNA in the major programs discussed above and the associated major research infrastructures, this master’s program is led by teachers with doctoral training in physics and/or engineering, via a double Grande Ecole-University curriculum, with various statuses, researchers from universities, schools, or national organizations and, of course, to ensure the legitimacy of their teaching at the Master’s level, engaged on a day-to-day basis in these thematics.

With slightly different names (infrastructure, facility, equipment, instrument ; always described as large, even very large), a large research facility is the heart of national or international networks: “very large research infrastructures” (TGIR) at the French ministry for research, a program coined « Very large instruments » (TGI) with the objective and performance contract between the French government and the High commission for nuclear energy and renewable energy, a European program “European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures” (ESFRI).

The web site dedicated to the latter will give you the complete panorama of all the projects ESFRI whose significant portion requests the competences taught in the master degree-2 describes below: Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI-Europe of theEast), Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research(Hamburg-Germany), System of production ofRadioactive Ions online of 2nd generation(Caen-France), … The French Ministry of Research provides another overview of research infrastructures for research in France.

These large instruments artificially create plasmas of terrestrial interest, whether for energy, for imaging under penetrating radiation, or for inducing subatomic reactions, but also of more fundamental interest in outer space contexts, in particular stars. The beams circulating in accelerators at relativistic energies (TeV at CERN for example) allow projects in astroparticles domain with its own dynamics and its own programs on the origin of the universe which give rise to other master-2 formations. Tokamak plasmas are plasmas that represent problems of magnetic field lines that can open and reconnect like in the sun. The plasmas created by intense laser pulses make it possible to recreate the conditions of a star core or of a supernova explosion, simulating star behaviors evolving over thousands of years at the nanosecond scale. Plasma jets, hydrogenated planetary cores, plasma jets, ion acceleration by non-collisional shock are all situations that couple artificial plasmas of large research infrastructures and natural plasmas. The latter also have their own program, their own instruments, and their space missions, which are the responsibility of other master-2 courses.