Reply To: What can we do with $189 Billion?

[markus7]

Asymmertic (I assume that is the spelling you were intending), thanks for this detailed reply.

Yes, materials issues are low hanging fruit for low cost parallel experiments.

Also, $50K is not a lot of money. Such sums might be adequate for parallel efforts done in universities (where the ‘pay’ is mostly the student learning opportunities and for the professors a chance to publish results) or perhaps by advanced amateurs.

I would be grateful for a suggested short list of the most relevant papers regarding focus fusion diagnostics. Diagnostics of the ion beam from the pinch sounds particularly interesting.

Thanks for pointing out some of the many issues with doing, in effect, ‘model tests’ of focus fusion ideas to help sort through the design space. I’ll try to learn more about the subject and start with some of the leads you have suggested here.

To your knowledge, is LPP’s filament approach (rather than just a plasma sheet) required to generate the giga(?) gauss local fields in the pinch region needed to make the concept work? I had assumed it was. Perhaps the physics (and optimized geometries) for generating such high local fields in the pinch could be at least partially explored in less expensive ‘model tests’ at lower currents and so forth.