TAE Technologies, Inc., formerly Tri Alpha Energy, is an American company based in Foothill Ranch, California developing aneutronic fusion power.

The company's design relies on an advanced beam-driven field-reversed configuration (FRC),[6] which combines features from accelerator physics and other fusion concepts in a unique fashion, and is optimized for hydrogen-boron fuel, also known as proton-boron or p-11B.

[7][8] It regularly publishes theoretical and experimental results in academic journals with hundreds of publications and posters at scientific conferences and in a research library hosting these articles on its website.

[28] Main financing has come from Goldman Sachs and venture capitalists such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's Vulcan Inc., Rockefeller's Venrock, and Richard Kramlich's New Enterprise Associates.

[34] TAE's technology was co-founded by physicist Norman Rostoker, as a spin-out of his work at the University of California, Irvine.

[39][40] Since 2014 TAE Technologies has worked with Google to develop a process to analyze the data collected on plasma behavior in fusion reactors.

[43] In November 2017 the company was admitted to a United States Department of Energy program, "Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment", that gave it access to the Cray XC40 supercomputer.

[47] TAE Life Sciences also announced that it would partner with Neuboron Medtech, which would be the first to install the company's beam system.

The TAE design forms a field-reversed configuration (FRC), a self-stabilized rotating toroid of particles similar to a smoke ring.

FRC fusion products are all charged particles for which highly efficient direct energy conversion is feasible.

[60] TAE Technologies relies on the clean 11B(p,α)αα reaction, also written 11B(p,3α), which produces three helium nuclei called α−particles (hence the name of the company) as follows: A proton (identical to the most common hydrogen nucleus) striking boron-11 creates a resonance in carbon-12, which decays by emitting one high-energy primary α−particle.

In 2010, Henry R. Weller and his team from the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) used the high intensity γ-ray source (HIγS) at Duke University, funded by TAE and the U.S. Department of Energy,[62] to show that the mechanism first proposed by Ernest Rutherford and Mark Oliphant in 1933,[63] then Philip Dee and C. W. Gilbert from the Cavendish Laboratory in 1936,[64] and the results of an experiment conducted by French researchers from IN2P3 in 1969,[65] was correct.

The company employed a much shorter device, an inverse cyclotron converter (ICC) that operated at 5 MHz and required a magnetic field of only 0.6 tesla.

[17][22][23] The estimation of the ratio of fusion power to radiation loss for a 100 MW FRC has been calculated for different fuels, assuming a converter efficiency of 90% for α-particles,[69] 40% for Bremsstrahlung radiation through photoelectric effect, and 70% for the accelerators, with 10T superconducting magnetic coils:[17] The spin polarization enhances the fusion cross section by a factor of 1.6 for 11B.

[17] Developed in 1998, the company’s proof-of-concept machine was created using a common sewer pipe and first demonstrated the viability of forming a field-reverse configured magnetic field.

Since the fusion products are charged particles and does not release neutrons, the system does not require the use of a massive radiation shield.

[11][78] The Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, Novosibirsk, built a powerful plasma injector, shipped in late 2013 to the company's research facility.

The device produces a neutral beam in the range of 5 to 20 MW, and injects energy inside the reactor to transfer it to the fusion plasma.

[27][79][80] In March 2015, the upgraded C-2U with edge-biasing beams showed a 10-fold improvement in lifetime, with FRCs heated to 10 million degrees Celsius and lasting 5 milliseconds with no sign of decay.

[citation needed] The C-2U functions by firing two donut shaped plasmas at each other at 1 million kilometers per hour,[81] the result is a cigar-shaped FRC as much as 3 meters long and 40 centimeters across.

[32] In 2023, the company published a peer-reviewed paper reporting the first measurement of p-11B fusion in magnetically confined plasma at the LHD in Japan.