Study of a Tangled Magnetic Field Target for Plasma-Jet-Driven Magneto-Inertial Fusion (PJMIF) using the Plasma Liner Experiment's (PLX) Diagnostic Suite

Plasma-jet-driven magneto-inertial fusion (PJMIF) is a novel approach towards the realization of controlled fusion. It is a hybrid concept between magnetic confinement fusion and inertial confinement fusion. PJMIF compresses a fusion fuel "target" plasmas via the use of spherically imploding plasma liners. Both the target and the liner are formed through the merging of supersonic plasma jets. This work will focus on the formation of a target plasma compatible with 3D spherical compression. The Plasma Liner Experiment (PLX) forms the target by merging a discrete number of magnetized supersonic plasma jets. Magnetic field lines, frozen into the jets, will become randomized and tangled due to durblence during the mergin process. These randomized fields increase the connection lengths between the core and the liner surfacethus reducing heat loss from the hot fuel plasma to the cold plasma liner. In this work, we study the formation and characteristics of a magnetized plasma target formed from the merging of 4 deuterium plasma jets at PLX at Los Alamos National Laboratory. A suite of diagnostics is used to characterize the target formation including 3-axis B-dot probe array for magnetic field measurements, a 5-chord interferometer for density measurements, soft x-ray measurements for temperature, and fast imaging. These results will not only be valuable to the plasma physics community—since high-beta plasmas with tangled magnetic fields have never been investigated before—but will also help assess the viability of various magneto-inertial fusion (MIF) approaches, such as PJMIF and magnetized liner inertial fusion (MagLIF).