Plasma acceleration by electromagnetic and magnetostatic field gradients

Abstract

The movement of charged particles in electromagnetic and magnetostatic field gradients is examined. It is shown that when the orientation and amplitude of such gradients are suitably arranged, the mean force in relation to time acting on these particles remains constant in direction. Discussed are this mean force and, more generally, the validity of the theory of mean value in relation to time. The results are applied to the case of a low-density plasma, and a brief description is given of four possible applications of a device based upon such forces: as injector, plasma propellant, vacuum pump and direct converter of thermal energy into u.h.f. electromagnetic energy. Orders of magnitude are stated. In two annexes, the authors determine the limits of validity of the theory based on mean value, and a comparison is made with an exact theory. The curves obtained are described and classified by analogue computer.

Ponderomotive barrier as a Maxwell demon

“…For instance, weak heating was studied for particles quasi-adiabatically trapped by an rf field within a plasma [13][14][15] with little attention to those transmitting through rf plugs and leaving the operating volume of the fusion device. The most general analytic model of transmitting particle dynamics was proposed in Ref.…”

Preliminary Study of a Hybrid Helicon-ECR Plasma Source

“…As for the ECR sources, they were first studied in the 1960's by Miller et al [5,6] as a system for space craft propulsion. After that there were many studies that used ECR in fusion research [7,8] . In addition, ECR based ion sources were developed due to their high plasma density at low pressure [9−14] .…”

Nonadiabatic Ponderomotive Potentials

“…For electrons and ions under rf drive near a cyclotron resonance in a magnetic field, this problem has been addressed previously in a number of works [2,8,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][25][26][27]. None of those, however, has introduced a non-singular ponderomotive potential in a non-heuristic fashion, except for the essentially perturbative analysis proposed in Refs.…”