Hi! My name is Jasper van Rens and I'm doing the Master Applied Physics at Eindhoven University of Technology. I followed a lot of Fusion courses and for my external traineeship I went to the United States to do research for ITER. I was hosted by Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL), but I ended up working at a company called NovaPhotonics, Inc. This company does research for the Motional Stark Effect (MSE) diagnostic in ITER.

My job was to find out whether reflections of bremsstrahlung and thermal radiation emitted by the incandescent divertor tiles would cause problems for the MSE diagnostic. I used the ray tracing program LightTools to answer this question, which has been open for years. It was very exciting to contribute to such a relevant problem! When my project was finished, I did a month of traveling through the US and I had the time of my life. Living and doing research abroad for a couple of months was a great experience. Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities to do this in Eindhoven!