research on plasma confinement

[CPL.Luke]

alrighty, so I have a new project on confineing a plasma using microwave radiation, and well after searching through several pages of google results and the like I can't find any existing research on it. Has anyone ever heard of research along these lines?

[Locrian]

Depends on how confined you want it and how you plan to confine it. Microwaves by themselves don't confine a plasma. Microwaves in a resonance cavity generate a plsama in a certain area, but it isn't confining it, it is just a matter of where you are reaching critical field strength to produce breakdown.

 

Can you give any more details? Is this still for fusion?

[5614]

So you could put it in an electrical potential well... which is basically say you have a plasma where the electrons are missing so the particles are all positively charged then a potential well would be a big negative charge in the middle, however you don't want the plasma to make physical contact, so you would for example make a ring of negative charge and have it oscillate to the plasma moves around within the ring of negative charge. It's like a well in that (in theory) nothing has the energy to get past or out of it.

 

Thinking about it if you had a positively charged plasma maybe you could set up a positively charged perimeter around it and then + to + repulsion may keep the plasma confined.

 

Indeed just checked this is the two types of potential wells:

 

The stable one, where if the plasma were to move towards an edge it would just be repelled away from it (so a positive perimeter, assuming the plasma is positive)

 

And the unstable one (negative perimeter) whereby if the plasma (assume + charge) moves towards an edge the attraction will increase so it will move closer to the edge etc. until it touches, hence the need for an osciallating attractive perimeter.

 

Although when I asked swansont about potential wells a while back he said:

 

And you can't confine them solely with repulsive forces either, so you end up putting an oscillating field in place, called a Paul trap, or RF trap.

 

So maybe the stable or repulsive perimeter idea doesn't work...

[CPL.Luke]

a static perimeter wouldn't work because of gauss's law, Locrian are you trying to say that where the microwaves aren't at a certain strength the plasma just cools off? so as to give the illusion that the plasma is being held in a fixed position?

[Locrian]

In a way. I mean, we talk of where our plasma is, and controlling its size, but it has to do with the way it is generated. It isn't as if you use microwaves by themselves to control a plasma - you use them to make one and your chamber (among other things) determines where it is formed.

 

The last time you posted about this I did a little research and there are some novel designs for fusion reactors out there that use bursts of microwaves in some manner to aid, but it wasn't alone or in a simple manner. That's why I was asking you if this is still about fusion.

[CPL.Luke]

sort of, it s geared towards fusion as a future application, but the project itself is more to see how feasible that would be

[5614]

So you'd need an oscillating perimeter or potential well, which as swansont said (well, I quoted him from somewhere else) is called a Paul trap or RF trap.

[Locrian]

sort of, it s geared towards fusion as a future application, but the project itself is more to see how feasible that would be

 

It seems so completely not feasible to me that I'm not sure even where to begin. If your electrodynamics and statistical mechanics are good, then you just need to get a book on plasma physics and see.

 

Sorry, each time you ask these vague questions about plasma and microwaves I feel compelled to answer, seeing as how I generate plasmas with microwaves 5-7 days a week. But you are always really asking questions from a different field than I work in. I've done some searches on Elsivier and came up dry.