OpenStar Technologies: Exploring plasma confinement by levitated dipoles

The dipole is nature’s way to magnetically confine a plasma. Planetary magnetospheres confine high beta plasmas with centrally-peaked density and pressure profiles that form in the aftermath of turbulent solar storms. These properties prompted Akira Hasegawa, while observing Voyager 2’s encounter with Uranus, to propose the levitated dipole as a fusion confinement concept. In the laboratory, RT-1, at the University of Tokyo showed plasma β ~ 1. The Levitated Dipole eXperiment (LDX), a joint Columbia/MIT project, demonstrated peaked “stationary” profiles driven by a turbulent pinch. Now, OpenStar Technologies is reviving the concept with next generation high temperature superconducting magnet technologies. The OpenStar team has constructed and are currently testing their first levitated dipole. This LDX-scale device is designed to demonstrate much of the magnet technology required for commercial dipole reactors and reproduce the results from LDX. The next generation machine has goal of reaching warm-ion fusion relevant plasma conditions and demonstrating the theoretically decoupled nature of the energy and particle transport within a dipole confined plasma, thus establishing the potential for levitated dipoles to be commercial fusion energy production devices.