RMFo-formed Collisionless High-b Plasmas: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

S.A. Cohen, Princeton

The field-reversed configuration (FRC) is a high-b plasma confinement concept that possesses many attractive features favoring its development into a practical fusion reactor. Previous FRCs operated in a collisional regime, far from fusion-reactor conditions. Relying heavily on COTS (commercial, off-the-shelf) hardware, a novel symmetry-preserving odd-parity rotating-magnetic-field (RMFo) heating method, non-invasive diagnostics, and remote divertor chambers, we have achieved a thousand-fold reduction in collisionality to n* = 10-3, volume-averaged b above 0.5, Te > 100 eV, and full penetration of the RMFo, while avoiding the radiation barrier encountered by other RMF/FRC experiments. The scientific motivations for a superconducting next-step RMFo device will be described.

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