For the fourth year, students of the Plasma Physics Department, LaPlas Institute, MEPhI, participated in a remote experiment on the GOLEM tokamak at the Czech Technical University (Prague). Participation in the experiment was a part of the training course that is taught by Alexander Vladimirovich Melnikov, a professor at MEPhI and a Deputy Head of the Department of Tokamaks KKTE NRC Kurchatov Institute.

The 2021 experiment was carried out by employees of the Czech Technical University. Professor Jan Steckl (formerly: a professor at MEPhI) gave lectures on various methods of plasma diagnostics at GOLEM. Vojtech Svoboda showed the tokamak in detail, its structural elements and diagnostic equipment, and organized access to the tokamak discharge remote control.

Students were divided into four groups. Each of them was asked to conduct several tokamak pulses, and then process the results and present some plasma parameters and dependencies.

Each student ignited a plasma discharge in the tokamak, changing its input parameters, and watched the results via a video broadcast on the GOLEM website. They can download the data with scripts for various programming environments for further processing. In the end, students presented the obtained results and discussed them with the employees of the Czech Technical University.

“Practical work on the existing installation is very useful; involvement in the real process of tokamak operation increases my research interest. It required increased attention to understand the ongoing processes, communication with teachers in English. It was very exciting! I would like to see similar events in the earlier years of study”, said Maria Popova, an experiment participant and a first-year master's program student at the LaPlas Institute, MEPhI.