Tom Swinburne's Book honour for PhD Thesis

Tom Swinburne, a Cohort 2 student has recently received an accolade by Springer Theses, not many PhD students get their thesis turned into a book.

The thesis attracted the attention of publishers Springer theses after it was nominated as an outstanding PhD thesis by Imperial College. He is supervised by Imperial College's Prof Adrian Sutton and CCFE's Prof Sergei Dudarev.

Tom used a range of advanced mathematics, supercomputer simulations and experimental data during his research.

In his thesis, Tom uses a simple household analogy to help explain his research, which focuses on materials for fusion reactors:

“Just like a carpet that's too big for its room, metals deform by buckling rather than squashing. These lines of atomic buckle are called dislocation lines. The irradiation of neutrons produced by fusion reactions creates small ‘loops' of dislocation line in the metal walls of a fusion reactor. This is a problem because the motion of dislocations can cause materials to bend and break, which is the last thing we want to see in a fusion power plant. My research is about understanding how heat affects the motion of dislocations, to help design a material that can be used to build a commercial fusion reactor which will last for decades.”

“This was a truly excellent piece of work, largely because of Tom's exquisite use of mathematical formalism,” mentioned CCFE's Sergei Dudarev. “To get to commercial fusion reactors, we have to crack the materials problems, and his thesis is another step towards understanding the processes that affect metals in the fusion environment.”

During his PhD, Tom has spent his time between London and Culham as a student at Imperial College's Centre for Doctoral Training for Theory and Simulation of Materials. He is now continuing his research as a Fusion Research Fellow at CCFE.

To read further about his work; Stochastic Dynamics of Crystal Defects is published by Springer Theses – please go to:

http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319200187.