Altator: A new toroidal outreach device for the PSFC

Altator is a table-top toroidal device under construction by a group of graduate students. This project is designed to make tokamak engineering more tangible for the public and give the students hands-on experience with a small-scale version of the systems they study. A major focus of the design is to have an easily visible, bright plasma. The vacuum vessel was thus chosen to be glass, and 500 kW of RF power coupled inductively to the plasma is expected to produce sufficient brightness. A key educational goal is to demonstrate the advancement of magnet technology through the use of resistive wound, Bitter plate, and HTS magnets for Altator's six toroidal field coils. To expand outreach beyond local tours, the process of designing Altator is publicized on social media accounts, such as Twitter and Instagram. A closer analogy to the tokamak, this device will supplement PSFC's current outreach device, a linear glow discharge.