The Deep Questions Raised by Navy Research

Discuss how polywell fusion works; share theoretical questions and answers.

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mattman
Posts: 459
Joined: Tue May 27, 2008 11:14 pm

The Deep Questions Raised by Navy Research

Post by mattman »

Hello,

This Navy Paper gets at a couple of concepts that: have been well studied, but are not well understood.

I think the next direction to go in, is to understand:

1. What is Cusp confinement?

2. How is it different from the Magnetic Mirror Effect?

3. How is a "free boundary" plasma, different from a "magnetized" plasma?

I would guess that 75% of plasma physics has basically forgotten about cusped confinement. Before 1980, it was a very healthy research topic. Dr. Park has stated that close to 200 papers were written on this topic. Because it failed experimentally, people (and funders) assumed that it would never work. The fields leaked at the ends! Even the magnetic mirror program used sharply bent fields - and they still saw major plasma leakage. The fields were looped together making the tokamak.

We need to get more general information on cusp confinement out in the public eye... the good news is the information is already there, it is just locked up in old papers from the 60's and 70's.

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