Reply To: NIMBY FUD

[asymmetric_implosion]

To give you an idea, PF papers appear at the rate of 100-200 per year since 1990 with some periodic behavior. They tend to spike in years with the Dense Z-pinch Meeting every three years. The percentage of these papers that deal with neutron production and fusion vary but they do make up a reasonable portion of the papers. A colleague is writing a review article on the PF for a journal so he did most of the digging into the history of the PF. I will see if he has a formal list to start with but my guess is he has a set of notes he understands with the key physics papers that make up his review. The paper should appear in a Special Issue of IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci in Dec 2012.

It is sad on some level how little progress has been made since the 1970’s. If you are looking for innovative ideas look to the 1970’s. Some new ideas have come up but most of the key physics and ideas were established long ago. Even concepts of what are referred to as plasmoids on this board are described back in the day. The old rule holds true, science is rediscovered every generation. Think you have an original idea, search papers from 20-30 years ago and you will find someone already did it. PF is old enough this rule holds true in general. Technology advances so more precise measurements can be made but to put things in perspective, LPPX published an image of a plasmoid in the PoP paper, similar images exist from the 1970’s. The resolution isn’t quite as good but 5 ns framing camera images are shown in these papers.

If you want the fast way to get the papers, there are about a dozen groups that publish regularly on the PF worldwide. Most of the university groups post their publications on-line. The NTU/NIE group does this frequently and their archive is pretty up to date with their own papers. This is a resource for expanding the search to the other groups such as the groups in Poland, Chile, US, Pakistan, India, etc. Those publishing in the field are citing the key papers in many of the articles. It doesn’t take long to put together the most important authors. My personal list includes two people that usually do a fine job keeping up with all the published work; Sing Lee and Pavel Kubes. The rest of us in the community cite their work for one reason or another.