Rebecca Riccioli built her expertise in one of fusion’s toughest engineering environments. During her PhD, she worked on the electromechanical modelling of ITER toroidal field conductors, where hundreds of Nb₃Sn superconducting strands must preserve their performance under repeated thermal and electromagnetic loads. At ITER, these toroidal field coils are among the largest components of the machine, each measuring 9 by 17 metres and weighing 330 tonnes.

Her work combined numerical tools, analytical models and experiments. By coupling MULTIFIL and THELMA, she helped reproduce the current sharing temperature observed in ITER conductors and gave researchers a clearer view of how local strain can gradually reduce electrical performance. It was a demanding fusion problem. It also created expertise with value far beyond fusion itself.

Today, Riccioli is a Magnet Engineer at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. PSI is the country’s largest research institute for natural and engineering sciences, and its Center for Accelerator Science and Engineering is responsible for the construction, operation and development of the institute’s particle accelerators. Through CHART MagDev, PSI is advancing superconducting magnet development with both Nb₃Sn and REBCO tape conductors studied numerically and experimentally.

This transfer is about know how. In fusion, conductor mechanics can decide whether a magnet keeps its performance over time. In accelerator research, those questions are becoming more important as superconducting technology moves forward. Riccioli’s background now helps PSI tackle winding and modelling challenges in complex magnet geometries, adapt tools first developed for round wires to tapes, and support work that can improve accelerator performance and future medical systems. PSI already uses a compact superconducting cyclotron for proton therapy, which shows how this chain of expertise can ultimately reach patients as well as researchers.