Sorbom has his doctorate from MIT and is co-founder and chief scientific officer of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a rapidly growing company spun out of Sorbom and his co-founders' research. CFS aims to commercialize fusion, a safe and virtually limitless source of "clean energy," to combat climate change. The company is funded by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates by way of energy innovation investment fund Breakthrough Energy. //

Creating and capturing the energy of the sun is delicate. A special form of hydrogen has to be heated until it gets to the fourth state of matter, plasma.

"If you heat a solid up, it turns into a liquid. If you heat that liquid up, it turns into a gas. If you heat that gas up, it turns into a plasma," he says, and "you get a charge soup of particles."

Plasma is an extremely fragile state of matter. If interrupted, the fusion reaction stops. So scientists developed a machine known by the Russian acronym tokamak, which uses magnetic fields to hold a doughnut of plasma safely in a container.

ИТЭР РФ | ITER RUSSIA
@iterrf
#DidYouKnow that the word "#tokamak" stands for "ТОроидальная КАмера с МАгнитными Катушками" (TOroidal'naya KAmera s MAgnitnymi Katushkami) - "toroidal camera with manetic coil" in english? #DYK #FusionEnergy @iterorg //

Research by Sorbom and his colleagues focuses on improving the tokamak, specifically by "making better and better magnets," Sorbom says.

Better and stronger magnets mean better insulation for the plasma, and the more efficiently the plasma can be heated up, the more energy that can be generated, eventually producing net energy. In the machines CFS is working on, temperatures will be around 100 million degrees Celsius, which is roughly 180 million degrees Fahrenheit.