Institute for Plasma Research, an autonomous Physics research institute under the aegis of Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India, was established in year 1986. The institute recognised world over for its research in various aspects of plasma science including basic plasma physics, research on magnetically confined hot plasmas and plasma technologies for industrial applications, has a huge scientific and engineering manpower.

The plasma research activities of institute can be categorized into three subsections –

1. 1. Studies on high temperature magnetically confined plasmas
   2. Basic experiments in plasma physics including free electron laser, dusty plasmas and other nonlinear phenomena
   3. Industrial plasma processing and application

At present, the work on high temperature magnetically confined plasmas is being conducted by the institute in its Aditya tokamak .The institute is also engaged in the fabrication of Steady State Superconducting Tokamak 1(SST1) for the purpose of studying the physics of the plasma processes in tokamak under steady state conditions and learning technologies related to the steady state operation of the tokamak.