A team of three Google DeepMind researchers and University of Maryland plasma physicist Matt Landreman used Google's Gemini 4 Argon to extend a set of exact solutions for the magnetic fields inside stellarator fusion reactors, solutions that had only recently overturned a conjecture Harold Grad posed in 1967.

The work, posted to arXiv on Oct. 5 by Opal Issan, Jonathan Citrin, Landreman and Brendan Tracey, builds on a paper Landreman posted on Sept. 22 . That paper gave two families of explicit, smooth 3D equilibrium solutions with nested magnetic surfaces, counterexamples to Grad's conjecture that such solutions don't exist without special symmetries. Landreman found them with OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra Pro, and his acknowledgments say all equations were confirmed manually.

Breaking the symmetry

Both of Landreman's families shared a property called stellarator symmetry, which left an open problem: exact, closed-form examples for configurations without it.…