Containment of a Fully-Ionized Plasma by Radio-Frequency Fields

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Abstract
A fully-ionized plasma is treated as a compressible loss free dielectric in a radio-frequency field. It is shown that there are steady forces which may be used to confine a body of dense plasma in a conducting cavity resonant in a suitable mode. In the particular case of a circular E 0 waveguide at cut-off, these forces are shown to be sufficient to contain a deuterium plasma at a particle density of 3 × 1018 per cm3 and a temperature of 105 °K by means of 140 kw of radio-frequency power at 500 Mc/s. Extrapolation to higher temperatures is discussed together with the possibilities of reduction in power requirements by operating in other modes.