HOME | FORWARD | BACK

It is now time to refine the model a bit. But first some motivation! Remember the whole “building a sun on earth” business? What people are trying to do is bring a plasma to a high enough temperature, in order to make Hydrogen combine to give Helium, a process known as fusion, which produces enormous amounts of energy, and actually powers the sun!

But how do you confine plasma? Since we can’t use electric fields, we have to use high magnetic fields! The particles (electrons and ions) are forced to spiral around the magnetic field lines and are therefore confined!

Such a device is known as TOKAMAK, and looks something like this

WOW, this is complicated!

Let’s start again, taking away all technical details we are left with something like this

That’s better! The coils produce a toroidal magnetic field, so electrons and ions move around this doughnut-shaped vessel.

We now see that magnetized plasma is important, let’s see a couple of waves that can occur inside it (again in a simplified case)