Injection and containment of unneutralized clouds of electrons has been accomplished with an azimuthally symmetric, toroidal, magnetic field. The confining magnetic field is produced within a conducting toroidal chamber. The induction of this magnetic field has been used to inject the electron cloud (inductive charging). Average electron densities of 4 × 109 cm−3 and peak electrostatic well depths of ≈ 400 kV have been achieved. Semiempirical correlations are given which show the inductive charging scheme to be governed by an electron energy restriction and finally limited by the occurrence of anomalous crossed field beam noise. Stable equilibria, without the necessity of a rotational transform have been observed for times in excess of 60 μsec. Correlation of the containment time observations with the predictions of a theoretical model for an ion-diocotron wave instability shows that the containment time is governed by the rate of ionization of the residual neutral gas (p > 10−7 Torr) in the apparatus. The correlation of theory and experiment appear to confirm the theoretical prediction that a significant degree of charge neutralization (in the range of 10-20%) can be stably contained. Interpretation of these results suggests that significant improvement in both electron cloud density and containment time should be possible.

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Thermal fluence deposition and surface pressure generation produced by a CO2 laser pulse (λ=10.6 μm, during 10 μs, maximum intensity 3 MW/cm2) have been measured as a function of angle of incidence ϑ on sheet aluminum in air. We find that air plasma ignition depends on the laser beam intensity I0 only, not on the surface-normal flux I0 cosϑ. Conversely, the fluence deposition and surface pressure depend only on the product I0 cosϑ, and obey the square-root and two-thirds-power dependences observed with simple I0 variation at normal incidence.

An analysis of the propagation of a laser beam in a cylindrical magnetically confined plasma with parabolic density profile is presented. The normal modes which are self-trapped are given. It is found that the largest mode that can be trapped by the plasma is given by (1/2) where R0 is the radius of the plasma column and w is the fundamental mode width. It is found that all the trapped modes in a finite plasma can easily propagate distances of the order of one kilometer. An exact solution for the amplitude of the electric field for an incident Gaussian beam has been obtained. The solution exhibits alternate focusing and de-focusing of the beam. The effect of this on the plasma heating is discussed.

A coaxial plasma gun experiment is described. The gun has an azimuthal bias magnetic field, which is strong compared to the field from the discharge current. The discharge voltage is shown to depend linearly on the bias field, thus defining a velocity that is found to be almost independent of the pressure and the discharge current. This velocity is close to the ``critical velocity'' which has been found in rotating-plasma experiments. The velocity of the current layer is also measured; it is always smaller than or equal to the critical velocity and it decreases with increasing pressure and decreasing magnetic field.