The Sherwood Conferences were a series of classified conferences that were held between 1952 and 1958 in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

. These conferences were a part of the United States controlled nuclear program called

Project Sherwood Project Sherwood was the codename for a United States program in controlled nuclear fusion during the period it was classified. After 1958, when fusion research was declassified around the world, the project was reorganized as a separate division w ...

. These conferences were established in order to entice experienced personnel to join the newly developed

. There were three different plasma confinement designs that were being researched in three different locations: the

stellarator A stellarator is a plasma device that relies primarily on external magnets to confine a plasma. Scientists researching magnetic confinement fusion aim to use stellarator devices as a vessel for nuclear fusion reactions. The name refers to th ...

Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory for plasma physics and nuclear fusion science. Its primary mission is research into and development of fusion as an energy source. It is known ...

, the torodial pinch at

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, i ...

, and the

magnetic mirror A magnetic mirror, known as a magnetic trap (магнитный захват) in Russia and briefly as a pyrotron in the US, is a type of magnetic confinement device used in fusion power to trap high temperature plasma using magnetic fields. Th ...

at the

Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...

. Because these individual projects operated in separate facilities, these conferences were helpful to strengthen communication of information between all three projects.

The First Conference

The first Sherwood conference was organized by the AEC director of the Division of Research, Thomas Johnson. The conference was held at the

University of Denver The University of Denver (DU) is a private research university in Denver, Colorado. Founded in 1864, it is the oldest independent private university in the Rocky Mountain Region of the United States. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Univ ...

Denver, Colorado Denver () is a consolidated city and county, the capital, and most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Its population was 715,522 at the 2020 census, a 19.22% increase since 2010. It is the 19th-most populous city in the United ...

on June 28, 1952. To attract more experienced personnel, workers already participating on the projects attended the conference. Overall, there were about eighty scientists that attended the first conference.

Dates and Locations of the Sherwood Conferences

References

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The First Conference

Dates and Locations of the Sherwood Conferences

References

See also