PRL physicist John Howard has made the finals of the minerals and energy category of The Australian Innovation Challenge awards with technology to advance the international fusion research effort.

"Coherence imaging" instruments manipulate light to produce high resolution images of basic plasma properties such as the ion velocity distribution function, plasma density and internal magnetic field structure.  These instruments, which are now deployed at many fusion laboratories around the world,  have recently produced the world's first pictures of the edge magnetic field inside high pressure tokamaks.