Joint appointment by IPP and TUM
Rudolf Neu: Professor at the Technical University of Munich and head of a research group at Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics
The appointment of Prof. Dr. Rudolf Neu marks the last of three planned professorships jointly installed by Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) to intensify their cooperation in the field of fusion research. The appointees are both professors at the university and heads of a research division or group at IPP.
The objective of the research conducted at IPP is to develop a power plant that, like the sun, derives energy from fusion of atomic nuclei. To ignite the fusion fire, one has to succeed in confining the hydrogen plasma fuel without wall contact in magnetic fields and heating it to temperatures of 100 million degrees. In this context, Rudolf Neu is investigating the interaction between the hot plasma and the surrounding vessel. As professor in TUM’s Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and head of IPP’s Plasma-Wall Interaction project he is concerned with how the hot plasma acts on the materials of the inner wall and how, in turn, particles ejected from the wall can influence the plasma.
Rudolf Neu, born 1961 in Tübingen, followed up the study of physics and his PhD at the University of Tübingen as a postdoc at Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching. After serving as visiting scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA, he took his lectureship in Experimental Physics at the University of Tübingen in 2004, where he was appointed professor extraordinary in 2011. He then headed for a year a work group at the Joint European Torus (JET), the joint experiment of the European Fusion Programme in the United Kingdom. In 2012 he took charge of the ITER Physics Department at the EFDA European organisation.
In 2014 he took up a joint appointment at IPP and TUM, as had previously been done by Dr. Ulrich Stroth (Professor in the Physics Department of TUM and head of IPP’s Plasma Edge and Wall research division ) and Dr. Eric Sonnendrücker (Professor at TUM’s Centre for Mathematics and head of IPP’s Numerical Methods in Plasma Physics division).