Autor: Alan Howling

Dr. Philippe Guittienne is a physicist at the Swiss Plasma Center (SPC) in the Basic Plasma Physics and Applications group under Prof. Ivo Furno, and founder of the Helyssen company in 2003. Following an engineering degree in physics (1997) and a doctorate (2002) in condensed matter physics at the EPFL on magnetization reversal in ferromagnetic nanostructures, he completely changed his field of interest to plasma physics with the idea of using resonant birdcages for helicon sources. He founded the Helyssen start-up in 2003, and started a collaboration with Dr. Christoph Hollenstein’s group at the SPC for the development of resonant antennas as plasma sources. Dr. Alan Arthur Howling is an Adjoint Scientifique/Senior Scientific Collaborator, co-founder of the group for industrial plasmas in 1989 with Dr. Christoph Hollenstein. He is currently a researcher and lecturer in the Basic Plasma Physics and Applications group under Prof. Ivo Furno at the Swiss Plasma Center, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland. He obtained a physics degree from Oxford University in 1981, and a doctorate from both Oxford and UKAEA Culham Laboratory in 1985. A postdoc on TCA tokamak in the Centre de Recherches en Physique des Plasmas at the EPFL was the springboard to industrial plasma research for the last 35 years. Prof. Ivo Furno is Adjunct Professor at the EPFL and leader of the Basic Plasma Physics and Applications (BPPA) group of the Swiss Plasma Center. He graduated in Nuclear Engineering from the Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 1995 and then he received his Ph D from the EPFL. He continued with a Postdoc at the Los Alamos National laboratory, where he studied magnetic reconnection on the Reconnection Scaling Experiment (RSX), before re-joining the EPFL in 2006. His research is marked by the use of human-scale, dedicated plasma devices to investigate the fundamental physics of plasmas under conditions ranging from fusion plasmas to plasmas of relevance for solar physics and to non-equilibrium cold plasmas for industrial and biological applications.