In Search of the Sun’s Energy. How a Scientist from Tajikistan Is Helping to Bring the Thermonuclear Revolution Closer

A virtually inexhaustible source of clean energy that could replace fossil fuels and change the future of humanity. These are the hopes that scientists place in nuclear fusion — a process that occurs deep within the Sun. Thousands of researchers around the world are working to study it today. Among them is Murtazo Nazarov, a native of Tajikistan.
In an interview with Asia-Plus, he described what it’s like to work on one of the most complex scientific challenges of our time.
The name Murtazo Nazarov is well known not only in scientific circles. Tajik and foreign publications have written about him on numerous occasions, and his research in the field of nuclear fusion has been the subject of interviews and articles.
A native of Isfara and a graduate of Khujand State University, Murtazo Nazarov has been living and working in Sweden for more than two decades. His scientific career took him through one of Europe’s leading technical universities, then to the United States, and today he conducts research in nuclear fusion at Uppsala University — Sweden’s oldest university.

How to study what cannot be seen

Nuclear fusion is often called the «energy of the future.» This is the very process that takes place deep within the Sun. At enormous temperatures, light atomic nuclei merge, releasing a tremendous amount of energy. Scientists around the world have been trying for several decades to reproduce this process under terrestrial conditions. If they succeed, humanity will gain access to a virtually inexhaustible source of clean energy with minimal environmental impact.
One of the key challenges on the path to this goal remains the study of plasma behavior — a superheated substance whose temperature reaches tens, and sometimes hundreds, of millions of degrees.
The main problem, Murtazo Nazarov explains, is that it is impossible to look inside plasma: no instrument can withstand temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees. That is precisely why the research begins with translating a real problem from physics or engineering into the language of mathematics.
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