For the first time worldwide, we have achieved remote, real-time control of fusion plasma using a digital twin running on a supercomputer located about 1,000 km away (round-trip network path ~2,000 km).

In magnetic confinement fusion power, sustaining and precisely controlling plasma at temperatures exceeding 100 million ℃ over long durations is essential. Yet “predicting-while-controlling” has been challenging due to model accuracy limits, computation speed, and unresolved physics. Our team has developed a system that applies data assimilation, continuously updating the predictive model with real-time measurements to improve accuracy and using accelerated parallel prediction to determine optimal unrehearsed control actions.

A research team from Kyoto University, the National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST), and the Institute of Statistical Mathematics (ISM), has connected the Large Helical Device (LHD) in Toki, Gifu, Japan to the new “Plasma Simulator” supercomputer in Rokkasho, Aomori, jointly procured by NIFS and QST, via the high-quality, high-bandwidth academic network SINET6. By exclusively using more than 20,000 Central Processing Unit (CPU) cores and minimizing communication latency, the team has realized real-time predictive control of LHD from a remote supercomputer. This approach — linking a large experimental facility and a large computing system over a ~2,000 km network loop — can serve as a foundation for real-time control beyond fusion.

Multimillion research to create the first ever 3D movies of black holes will combine pioneering international expertise in black hole imaging with cutting-edge artificial intelligence developed in the UK.

Dr Kazunori Akiyama has been awarded a £4 million Faraday Discovery Fellowship through the programme's Accelerated International Route, to be hosted by Heriot-Watt University. The project, named TomoGrav, brings together the pathbreaking expertise of Dr Kazunori Akiyama and Professor Yves Wiaux.

Dr Akiyama developed one of the computational imaging algorithms and co-led the entire imaging team as part of the wider Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration efforts to create the first images of black holes.   Professor Yves Wiaux’s groundbreaking artificial intelligence algorithms are transforming how scientists reconstruct images from incomplete data. 

Dr Akiyama and Professor Wiaux are supported by a multidisciplinary team of 10 world-renowned partners from across the world, whose combined expertise will deliver the work.

The funding will see Dr Akiyama move from his present role as a Research Scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Haystack Observatory in the USA to Heriot-Watt University in Scotland as part of the scheme which provides long-term funding to talented mid-career researchers.

Using revolutionary imaging technology, the research is expected to transform understanding of the universe's most extreme environments by revealing how black holes behave and evolve across time.

Black holes are cosmic laboratories where gravity results as a byproduct of the warping of spacetime. Gas swirling around them is heated to extreme temperatures and accelerated to nearly light speed, generating powerful jets of magnetised plasma that are thought to influence the form of the largest scale structures in the universe.

The new research builds on the 2019 and 2022 photographs of two supermassive black holes, M87* and Sagittarius A*, which captivated billions of people worldwide and opened an entirely new scientific area which uses imaging to study gravity and black holes.