Studies on the heating and containment of plasma in a magnetic trap : the behaviour of a slow toroidal o - z pinch

Abstract

The suggestion that thermonuclear reactions were the energy source of stars was made in 1928 by Atkinson and Houtermans , but it was not until the end of World War II that serious consideration was given to the possibility of controlled production of thermonuclear power. It was apparent that any likely fusion reactor would entail the use of magnetic fields to insulate the hot plasma from the walls of the containing vessel, and experiments were begun in several countries to investigate the heating and confinement of hot conducting gas in a magnetic field. One early suggestion was to utilise the self magnetic field of a discharge current for both of these purposes . Bennett, in 1934, had obtained an expression for the pressure balance in the self-constriction or "pinching" of a high current gaseous discharge by its own magnetic field, but no experimental investigations were reported until 1951, when Cousins and Ware demonstrated the pinch effect in a small glass torus.