"As far as we know, that's a record for any fusion plasma," Lerner says.

"In the critical measure of how much energy out we get per unit energy in, we're No. 2 among all the experiments in the world," Lerner says. "And we're only one-third behind the JET [Joint European Torus] experiment in the United Kingdom—which has almost a thousand times our resources. In terms of results per unit dollar, we're clearly No. 1, by a long way."

LPPFusion hopes to be fusing proton and boron by next year.

They are cleaning Tungsten electrode impurities from a chamber and moving to being Beryllium electrodes soon which will not have impurity problems

Based on tests conducted in May, the LPPFusion research team decided that more microwave power was needed to clean the oxides off our tungsten electrodes. The oxides, which break up easily when heated, had been contributing impurities to the plasma and limiting fusion yield. We decided to mount two kW microwave magnetrons on a single large window to double the power. The larger window admitted the 12-cm-long waves far more efficiently than a smaller window used with the second magnetron in May.