Collaborative Research
For your visit to NIFS:
Contact Persons
NIFS Research Support Division Research Support Section
322-6 Oroshi-cho, Toki City, GIFU Prefecture
509-5292 Japan
Tel. +81-572-58-2043, 2044
E-mail: 
Domestic Collaboration Research Programs
In order to satisfy the broad needs for advancing cutting-edge research, NIFS conducts four collaboration research programs. These are Bilateral Collaboration Research, LHD Project Collaboration Research, General Collaboration Research, and Fusion DEMO Reactor Collaboration Research. The joint use and joint research activities are powerfully developed by accepting research proposals from researchers each year.
NIFS collaboration research activities are always reviewed and improved so as to be compatible with the latest research trends by changing the categories of collaboration. In FY2022, the categories of General collaboration Research were revised, the figures show the number of accepted collaboration subjects in each category.
Bilateral Collaboration Research
Bilateral collaboration research promotes joint research bilaterally between NIFS and a research institute or a university research center which has a unique facility for nuclear fusion research. Under the collaboration, the facility is open for the researchers all over the country as a joint use program of NIFS, an inter-university research institute. This is a unique feature of the system and attracts attention as an example of an advanced network-type joint research system in Japanese academia.
At present, five research centers are participating in the program. They are: the Plasma Research Center at the University of Tsukuba, the Laboratory for Complex Energy Processes at Kyoto University, the Institute of Laser Engineering at Osaka University, the Advanced Fusion Research Center at Kyushu University, and the Hydrogen Isotope Research Center, Organization for Promotion of Research, at the University of Toyama.
LHD Project Collaboration Research
LHD Project Collaboration Research is joint research whereby collaborators research and develop, first at their respective universities, various kinds of new devices, technologies, or methods that can be applied to the LHD experiments. Through research and development, LHD Project Collaboration Research also aims at contributing to the progress of research activities at universities.
The opinions and recommendations from the nuclear fusion research community are important. It is a significant feature of this system that the Nuclear Fusion Network, which is composed of university researchers, is involved in the review of research proposals together. Multi-year proposals are also available. In some cases, NIFS offers the collaborators a specific research category for submitting their application.
In principle, the research should be shifted to General Collaboration Research in order to apply the results to the LHD after completing the research and development successfully.
General Collaboration Research
General Collaboration Research is a system for the collaborators to carry out their research by using the facilities or the resources of NIFS, including experimental devices, diagnostics, the supercomputer, databases, and others. Because nuclear fusion includes a wide research area in physics and technology, from fundamental research to application, the system has a variety of categories.
In this collaboration, the collaborators come to NIFS and carry out research at NIFS. However, if it is necessary, NIFS staff can go to the university of a collaborator to perform joint research there. Furthermore, in the "network-type collaboration" category, the collaborators may conduct experiments at other universities involved in a particular project.
Many exploratory research proposals are adopted in the General Collaboration Research, and since a graduate student can be a collaborator, it is useful for training young researchers.
Fusion DEMO Reactor Collaboration Research
This collaboration program was initiated in fiscal year 2019 as the fourth category of the collaboration programs conducted by NIFS to accelerate the "action plan towards fusion DEMO research and development", which was composed by the Taskforce on DEMO Comprehensive Strategy in the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). This program attempts to solve issues of the “action plan", together with the collaboration programs conducted by the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST).
