Newsgroups: sci.physics.plasma
From news@mercury.cc.uottawa.ca Thu Jul 25 12:03:36 1996
From: dmr@aix1.uottawa.ca (Daniel Racicot)
Organization: University d'/of Ottawa
Subject: A "cold" dense plasma?

Hello

Could someone please point out if the following layman's intuition
is valid.

I have fair working knowledge of magnetically confined fusion
(little of plasma though). Here one has an incredibly hot plasma
with modest density possible only due to high magnetic pressure
supplied by surrounding coils. Eg 0.5 Tesla gives 1 atm, 5 Tesla
gives 100 atm, with effective pressure going up with the square of
field.

My question is: what kind of density would be possible at low
plasma temperatures in a simple mirror or Tokomak at say 5 Tesla?
Back of the envelope calculation assuming near ideal gas behaviour
would suggest a 3000 K plasma at 5 Tesla would result in
10 times atmospheric density. Does this somewhat surprising
result make sense or are there other factors that would come into
play? What kind of difference in ion and electron temperatures
would one expect? At these "cool" temperatures would the field be
effective at keeping a reactive plasma away from the walls? Would
this setup be equally valid for atoms of low or high atomic weight?
Although admitedly prohibitively expensive, would this be
technologically feasible?

Thanks in advance for any help on this speculation.
--
Daniel Racicot
Dept. of Physics, University of Ottawa
dmr@physics.uottawa.ca ! The me that works on a thesis
ak426@freenet.carleton.ca ! The me that reads alt.grad.skool.sux