This paper presents an overview of recent research advances on the Globus-M2 spherical tokamak over the past two years. Upgrades to the diagnostic complex are reported. A novel inter-shot boronization technique demonstrated superior wall conditioning, achieving effective charge 1.1 and doubling the neutron yield through enhanced fast ion confinement. The hot-ion mode was established as a natural regime, with ion temperatures up to 4.7 keV, revealing that D-neutral beam injection (NBI) provides superior ion thermal insulation compared to H-NBI due to higher toroidal momentum input. Ion cyclotron resonance heating experiments demonstrated effective bulk ion heating and beam ion acceleration. For the first time in a spherical tokamak, the high-field side high-density phenomenon was identified, with SOLPS-ITER modeling confirming the dominant role of plasma drifts. MHD stability studies characterized Alfvén eigenmodes causing localized wall loads up to ∼30 MW/m2, identified locked modes as a key performance limitation, and demonstrated access to small-edge localized modes (ELM) and ELM-free regimes at reduced triangularity. These results provide the foundation for the design of the next-generation Globus-3 spherical tokamak.
Bakharev et al. (Wed,) studied this question.