Encouraging Results and New Ideas for Fusion in Linear Traps

Results, obtained during the last decade on linear traps in Novosibirsk, verified the original concepts and led to discovery of new ways of plasma confinement in linear traps. It turns out that the multiple-mirror confinement, once thought to be suitable for pulsed fusion only, can work in tandem with gas-dynamic traps. Its helical-mirror variant can provide additional advantages for confinement of rotating plasmas such as radial and axial plasma pinch fluxes. The specially designed gas-dynamic mirrors can be run in the high-β “diamagnetic” regime, closely resembling the field-reversed configurations both in shape and in the quality of axial confinement. These new ideas form the groundwork of the possible road for linear traps to fusion.