The European Commission has named three winners of the 2026 Symposium on Fusion Technology (SOFT) Innovation Prize, awarding a total of €100,000 for proposals linking fusion researchers with industry.
The prize is funded by the EU’s Euratom Research and Training Programme, which supports nuclear research and training including fusion and nuclear safety, according to the Commission’s statement released on Wednesday.
The top award of €50,000 went to Lasermag, an innovation from the French start-up Renaissance Fusion, for a manufacturing approach for high-temperature superconducting magnets using laser-engraved tapes that are wound into magnetic coils.
The Commission said the Lasermag approach is intended to tackle barriers in the development of stellarators — a type of fusion device that uses twisted magnetic fields to confine hot plasma.
A €30,000 prize went to Miami, developed by a team at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, for an upgrade to ion beam analysis — a technique used to study materials — designed to address low throughput, high costs and complex data evaluation, the Commission said.
It added that the Miami technology could be used beyond fusion, including in battery development and geology.
How the winners were chosen
The €20,000 award went to microRaman, developed by a team at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, for a system intended to improve in-situ gas analysis in fusion by measuring hydrogen isotopologues in real time — different forms of hydrogen, including those involving heavier variants such as deuterium and tritium.
The Commission said microRaman is designed for tritium-compatible environments and is intended to be compact and alignment-free.
Eight proposals were submitted for the latest round and evaluated by an independent jury using criteria including originality, technical excellence and economic impact.
