Will Jack » Pages

will jack

My name is Will Jack. I am a member of the class of 2017 at MIT and I love engineering and physics. I made this blog to share my adventures into these fields.

Please feel free to contact me via email at wjack@mit.edu

Recently I competed in a series of local and regional science fairs, and I have been selected as a grand prize winner to head to the Intel International Science Fair in Pittsburgh! I will have the reactor there, so if anybody wants to come see it and chat

Another Belated Update

I’m not going to lie, I totally forgot to update this blog over the summer, but in the future I’m going to try to keep it a bit more current. Anyway, a lot of things have happened since I last posted! I am working on building a new reactor, IEC fu

Fusor Update and Science Fairs

Sorry I haven't written for a while, but the science fair and school have completely consumed my life. This is just a quick update on the fusor. I am currently upgrading my vacuum system and and adding in a diffusion pump, which is a type of high

Time for Some Hacking

I have been pretty down recently because rather than building awesome things, I’ve been writing tons of college and scholarship applications. But, that all paid off just a few days ago when I found out that I had been accepted to MIT!I have been feeling

IEC Fusion Reactor MK II

This page covers my Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion Reactor MK II, which fuses ions of deuterium into helium-3 through inertial electrostatic confinement. In order to learn about how it works, visit the Basics of IEC Fusion page I have written.&

My Talk in Berlin

Here’s a video of the talk I gave in Berlin about the fusion reactors I’ve built: [youtube]dS_l9HED3yQ[/youtube]

I recently shot a couple of videos of my air cannon and put them in a compilation. The camera used was a casio Exilim Fc-100. Enjoy! [youtube]1I-npNUVVFU[/youtube]

IEC Fusion Reactor MK III

Recently I've been working on a new reactor, IEC Fusion Reactor MK III. Unlike its predecessor, MK III is based in a small, 1.5 in diameter, cross shaped chamber. Small reactor designs have shown promise of high efficiency and high neutron rates, and

A Pen and a Confession

Alright, I need to confess to a terrible habit of mine: I lose pens like it is my job. While I have been making strides in keeping track of my pens it is still a problem, so I figured what might help would be having a pen that I have some sort of personal

Lensless Single Pixel Cameras

So, a while back I stumbled [url=http://www.technologyreview.com/view/515651/bell-labs-invents-lensless-camera/]across this article[/url]. To summarize it, Bell Labs built a single pixel camera that needs no lenses to operate… pretty cool concept right

A laser with no optical cavity that operates at atmospheric pressure…wait…what? Yes, you heard me right, this is a laser that uses no mirrors to bounce light back and forth (an optical cavity or resonator), no special gas mixture, and operates at

IEC Fusion Reactors

I have received many questions about how exactly my reactor operates so here is a post explaining it. The inertial electrostatic confinement fusion reactor is a device that uses electrostatic fields to accelerate and confine a deuterium plasma to a c

I have built a DC magnetron ion source for IEC Reactor MK. III in hopes that it would stabilize reactor operation and perhaps even increase neutron rates. The ion source consists of a .05” diameter x 1” length stainless anode aligned coaxially i

A Summer at PPPL

I’ve got a job. My first job. And it is freaking awesome. Well, it’s kind of a job. Technically it’s a paid internship, but I guess there’s really not that much of a difference. Anyway, I’m being paid to research at the Princeton Plasma Physics