Attainment of high plasma pressures by a large number of channeled pinch discharges intersecting in one point

If a large number of laser- or charged particle beam-channeled gas embedded Z-pinch discharges, with alternating directions of the currents for adjacent pinch discharges, are made to intersect in one point, one obtains a quasispherical plasma configuration likely to be stable against the m=1 kink instability. Because gas-embedded Z-pinch discharges are diffuse, they should also be stable against the m=0 sausage instability and all other higher than m=1 instabilities. In the proposed plasma configuration the pressure falls off radially with an 1/r2 dependence. If, for example, the plasma pressure at the periphery of a 25 cm plasma sphere is 100 atm≅108 dyn/cm2, corresponding to a magnetic field of ∼5x104 G, the plasma pressure at a radius of ∼0.3 cm from the center of the sphere would have risen to 700000 atm, with the magnetic field at this distance equal to ∼4x106 G. At a thermonuclear temperature of ∼109 K, the plasma particle number density at this distance would be ∼3x1018 cm-3, with a correspondingly high thermonuclear reaction rate. The feasibility of such a plasma configuration for the controlled release of thermonuclear energy then only depends on the radial heat conduction losses in the presence of a strong perpendicular magnetic field. It appears that these losses can be made smaller than the heat released by the thermonuclear reaction. copyright 1996 American Institute of Physics