This paper highlights the most important results achieved at the spherical tokamak Globus-M2 with a high magnetic field. This paper also covers the most important topics of fusion research: thermal energy confinement in regimes with neutral beam injection, toroidal Alfvén eigenmode and correspondent fast ions confinement issues, L-H transition, turbulence suppression and edge-localized modes' behavior, experimental and theoretical study of regimes with nitrogen seeding that allow to significantly reduce thermal loads on the divertor plates, and experiments and simulations of lower hybrid current drive. The research results provide the basis for the next step toward a fusion neutron source—the development of the Globus-3 spherical tokamak.

The paper deals with the identification of plasma equilibrium reconstruction in D-shaped tokamaks on the base of plasma external magnetic measurements. The methods of such identification are directed to increase their speed of response when plasma discharges are relatively short, like in the spherical Globus-M2 tokamak (Ioffe Inst., St. Petersburg, Russia). The new approach is first to apply to the plasma discharges data the off-line equilibrium reconstruction algorithm based on the Picard iterations, and obtain the gaps between the plasma boundary and the first wall, and the second is to apply new identification methods to the gap values, producing plasma shape models operating in real time. The inputs for on-line robust identification algorithms are the measurements of magnetic fluxes on magnetic loops, plasma current, and currents in the poloidal field coils measured by the Rogowski loops. The novel on-line high-performance identification algorithms are designed on the base of (i) full-order observer synthesized by linear matrix inequality (LMI) methodology, (ii) static matrix obtained by the least square technique, and (iii) deep neural network. The robust observer is constructed on the base of the LPV plant models which have the novelty that the state vector contains the gaps which are estimated by the observer, using input and output signals. The results of the simulation of the identification systems on the base of experimental data of the Globus-M2 tokamak are presented.

On 22 January 2024, at the age of 78, Yuri Vladimirovich Mitrishkin (Figure 1), an outstanding scientist and remarkable educator with half a century of experience, passed away unexpectedly